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You missed one of the most major issues:

Most of the vendors know they have serious issues here, but hide them. Literally. You never notice because they don't use open source compilers (even for things like CUDA, let alone shader compilers), so it's not obviously more than "just a bug" until it happens to you continuously. Instead, they pretty much never have to fix the bug until someone notices, and then they hack it some more and move on, instead of fixing underlying issues in their structurization/etc passes.

Most vendors i've talked to can't even tell me what control flow breaks their compiler (again, doesn't matter if we are talking shaders, cuda, you name it. it's all broke), they know plenty does, but are fairly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about doing more than working around whatever bug they get given.

Meanwhile, over in open source clang/llvm world, we can basically fuzz test CFG's, etc for CUDA.

The death of some of these compilers can't come fast enough.



"You never notice because they don't use open source compilers (even for things like CUDA, let alone shader compilers)"

Actually AMD recently completely open sourced their entire GPGPU compute stack. See https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute

Compiler, assembler (LLVM based), linker, driver, etc. Everything is open to my knowledge.


Actually, we wrote the CUDA support in clang :)

and yes, AMD has done this because they have nothing to lose anymore :)


Even worse some of the mobile GPU vendors, coming from the hardware/silicon industry, sometimes provide fixes to their bugs only when a customer asks for it, leaving the fix out of the master repository for fear of providing evidence to potential litigators and IP to competitors.




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