Nvidia brings native GPU programming to Rust with CUDA Rust
Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
Nvidia has announced CUDA Rust, enabling developers to write GPU kernels directly in Rust and compile them natively to PTX. The toolchain offers two tracks: SIMT, for thread-level programming like CUDA C++, and Tile, a higher-level model where the compiler maps tiles to hardware. Both aim to catch memory and aliasing bugs at compile time, with inter-language interop planned. The move reflects Rust's growing role in AI systems infrastructure.
The GPU kernel is the exception. You can launch kernels from Rust, but the kernel itself often has to be written in another language. NVIDIA CUDA Rust closes that gap.
- jacobgorm
I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p into your C++ codebase, it is very hard to get rid, and you end up with code that is either tied to a single vendor or an #ifdef hell, probably both.
The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually, like in Metal, OpenCL, and D3D12, etc.
These days we even have DSLs like Triton that make kernel writing much more ergonomic than anything you would hope to achieve in Rust.
- loup-vaillant
Okay, so, GPUs are taking one more step towards being general purpose massively parallel machines. That's cool.
What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal. That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we send to & get from the GPU, the ISA of the cores we have access to, the relevant performance characteristics…
In other words, enough information to write a state-of-the-art driver for any OS. That would be cool.
- dllu
Since NVIDIA owns huggingface now and huggingface has the excellent Candle [1] crate for inference on Rust, this seems like a good step towards nice native Rust kernels.
- lambdaone
The momentum behind rust seems absolutely unstoppable at the moment, in the light of this, the adoption of Rust into the Linux kernel, and the adoption of for formally verified software by Amazon and Microsoft.
- winwang
Really exciting but it reads like Claude instead of what Nvidia posts have generally been like in the past. I don't need nor want my tech blogs to sound like a young adult novel.
- manyatoms
How does this compare to vectorware? (https://www.vectorware.com/blog/)
- HexDecOctBin
Anyone know when Rust's std::autodiff will become stable? Assuming this Rust support expands to other GPU vendors, autograd will probably be the only reason to use Slang instead of Rust anymore.
- michalsustr
Not a cuda programmer, but since they’re making a new API, why would they already make it inconsistent at start? :-/ I’m referring to the examples a,b,c vs z,x,y (different ordering of output elements)
- evaltoken
Interesting direction from Nvidia. Anything that makes writing reliable GPU code less painful is definitely a good thing.
- soleveloper
So now every already written kernel can be re-written in Rust and have competitive performance to the cpp version?
If so, that's really big.
And to add the Next natural strp - custom codegen for simulating gpu compute and memory without Nvidia gpu.