"...I'll use OpenCL so I can be hardware agnostic..." Woah now... Using OpenCL is imminently sensible for a large swath of applications. And "Hardware Agnosti

"...I'll use OpenCL so I can be hardware agnostic..." Woah now... Using OpenCL is imminently sensible for a large swath of applications. And "Hardware Agnosticism" is beneficial for a large number of reasons. This is only the first "accessible" platform that has been released... we can expect many, many more. DSL -> asm on each can get a bit tiresome. Many apps can benefit from running in more than one place. For instance, I scaled out an authoritative game server using OpenCL recently. Because I used OpenCL, I could run it on Amazon GPGPU instances as well as locally on the server here. Two different sets of cards... same codebase... only difference was instead of 100's of thousands of users on the local server, you can support millions on Amazon. There is something to be said for that sort of flexibility. Couple that with a clustered vert.x event bus, and you begin to see the power such a system might bring... and that's just for a trivial application like gaming!!! Imagine the benefits accrued to other, more complex, applications! You should think carefully prior to being dismissive of hardware agnosticism. If you want to tinker and determine what is possible with this particular platform, by all means, use platform specific tools. However, if you want to bring the power of parallel processing to bear in solving problems wherever you find them... thinking about hardware agnosticism really is a "must-do" as my daughter would say.