Rust CUDA Project

Summary, from someone who uses CUDA on rust in several projects (Computational chemistry and cosmology simulations):

  - This lib has been in an unusable and unmaintained state for years. I.e., to get it working, you need to use specific, several-years-old variants of both rustc, and CUDA.
  - It was recently rebooted. I haven't tried the Github branch, but there isn't a release yet. Has anyone verified if this is working on current Rustc and CUDA yet?
  - The Cudarc library (https://github.com/coreylowman/cudarc) is actively maintained, and works well. It does not, however, let you share host and device data structures; you will [de]serialize as a byte stream, using functions the lib provides. Works on any (within past few years at least) CUDA version and GPU.

I highlight this as a trend I see in software libs, in Rust more than others: The projects that are promoted the most are often not the most practical or well-managed ones. It's not clear from the description, but maybe rust-CUDA intends to allow shared data structures between host and device? That would be nice.

We observed the same thing here at Copper Robotics where we absolutely need to have good Cuda bindings for our customers and in general the lack thereof has been holding back Rust in robotics for years. Finally with cudarc we have some hope for a stable project that keeps up with the ecosystem. The last interesting question at that point is why Nvidia is not investing in the rust ecosystem?