In this talk we will describe the new language mode that has been added into Clang for using functionality of C++17 in the OpenCL kernel language - C++ for OpenCL. As this language mode is fully backwards compatible with OpenCL C 2.0, existing OpenCL applications can gradually switch to using C++ features without any major modifications.
During the implementation the strategy was chosen to generalize features that exist in a range of accelerator devices to C++. For example, address space support was improved in C++ to be used as a language extension and OpenCL functionality was built on top of it. This was done to take advantage of common logic in some language features among multiple C++ dialects and extensions that are available in Clang.
At the end of the talk we will describe the future roadmap. Some documentation has been started in Clang (
https://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html#opencl-features). There is also discussion with the Khronos Group about wider adoption of this language mode and possibly more formal documentation to appear in the future. Additionally we would like to highlight our positive experience of community engagement and the help we have received with early testing and feature evaluation from the users of Clang.
