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.

I’m a rust-GPU maintainer and can say that shared types on host and GPU are definitely intended. We’ve mostly been focused on graphics, but are shifting efforts to more general compute. There’s a lot of work though, and we all have day jobs - we’re looking for help. If you’re interested in helping you should say so at our GitHub.

What is the intended distinguisher between this and WGPU for graphics? I didn't realize that was a goal; have seen it mostly discussed in context of CUDA. There doesn't have to be, but I'm curious, as the CUDA/GPGPU side of the ecosystem is less developed, while catching up to WGPU may be a tall order. From a skim of its main page, it seems like it may also focus on writing shaders in rust.

Tangent; What is the intended distinguishes between Rust-CUDA, and Cudarc? Rust shaders with shared data structures I'm guessing is the big one. That would be great! There of course doesn't have to be. More tools to choose from, and that encourages progress from each other.