Computation MMXII

2012
Not planning on using OpenCL for your projects going forward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-bkNEaJJ4

Seriously, if you aren't learning OpenCL, you're going to be obsolete if you're a low-level C/C++ programmer, game programmer, AI programmer, etc.

>>23
Because garbage collection relies on references and object nesting to determine what is garbage and what is still alive. You're thinking in terms of objects, and you can't do that for GPU/FPGA programming. You need to think in terms of linear buffers and homogenous arrays. You aren't writing functions that operate on single rinky-dink object, but rather functions that transform huge amounts of data of the same type. Think game programming, CAD/3D modeling rendering, computer vision, medical simulations, data mining, etc.

If you want to do rinky-dink "Hello World" programs or stdin/stdout stream processing, just use C or Common Lisp.

Implicit memory allocation and "collection" if you want to call it that is probably easier to implement than a general purpose garbage collector. It's similar to how stack allocation works in C or C++, but instead of a sequential/imperative order, stack frames go in and out of scope at common task dependency barriers.