The First Baby Step Towards Intel's SYCL Support In LLVM Clang Lands In Git/SVN

On the LLVM/Clang front one of the milestones we are looking forward to hopefully see happen in 2019 is the merging of Intel's SYCL back-end. The first baby step in that direction has now been merged to Clang albeit it's not the actual back-end and just preparatory work.

In early January we reported that Intel was looking to add SYCL support to LLVM/Clang for the single-source programming model based on C++ that in turn can target accelerators from GPUs to FPGAs and DSPs. This SYCL effort for mainline Clang is most likely part of Intel's oneAPI initiative they announced back in December.

At the end of January, Intel posted their initial LLVM Clang SYCL open-source compiler code for interested parties. That code contains the compiler side work as well as run-time support code and has a prerequisite of having working OpenCL 2.1 support on the systems.

That code still needs to be closely reviewed and likely will take some months still before it's merged to master. But the good news is the first tiny piece working in that direction has been merged to Clang Git. That code from Intel is just the few lines of boilerplate code needed to add a Clang front-end option for enabling SYCL device compilation flow. The actual SYCL support though hasn't been merged, this is just the first bit of SYCL code that's now been reviewed and merged. We'll hold out hope that the complete Intel SYCL implementation can be reviewed and merged in time for the LLVM Clang 9.0 release due out this autumn, stay tuned to Phoronix to hear as the work advances.