[Anandtech] Khronos Announces WebCL 1.0, SYCL 1.2, and EGL 1.5 Specifications

With WebCL Khronos and its members are looking to do for OpenCL what WebGL has done for OpenGL, which is to make a suitable subset of these APIs available in browsers. With heavy "web application" style websites continuing to grow in popularity, the idea is to expose these APIs to programs running in a web browser, to reap the many of the same benefits that native programs would have from using the full-fledged version of their respective API. WebGL has already seen some success in offering hardware accelerated 2D/3D graphics within browsers, and now Khronos has turned their eye towards high performance heterogeneous computing with WebCL.

With SYCL, Khronos is looking to solve one of the greatest programmer demands of OpenCL, which is to enable OpenCL programming in C++. OpenCL itself is based on C, and while the languages have similarities, at the end of the day C is functionally a lower level language than C++, both a blessing and a curse in the case of OpenCL. One of the reasons for the success of competing platforms such as CUDA has been their better support for high level languages like C++, so SYCL is Khronos's attempt to push ahead in that space. And unlike platforms like CUDA, the wider array of hardware OpenCL supports means that SYCL will be focusing on a few features that don't necessarily exist on alternative platforms, such as single source C++ programming for OpenCL.

EGL 1.5 also introduces some changes to better support WebGL and OpenCL. These are fairly low level changes, but we're looking at interoperability improvements to better allow OpenGL ES and OpenCL to work together when EGL is in use, and some new restrictions on graphics context creation to better harden WebGL against attacks.

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