thoughts on opencl + array methods

I was going to have a quick look at removing the erroneous asynchronous Get/SetPrimitiveArrayCritical() stuff from zcl this morning but I've hit a complication too far for my tired brain.

I changed to just allocating a staging buffer and using Get/Set*ArrayRegion() for the read/writeBuffer commands. I only allocate enough memory for the transfer and copy the transfer size around and so on. It's a bit bulky but it's fairly straightforward.

Then I started looking at the image interfaces and realised doing the same thing is somewhat more complex - either I have to copy the whole array to/from the staging buffer to/from each time (if the get/set updates on a portion of the image for example) or I have to flatten the transfer myself. The former pretty much makes the function pointless and the latter bulks out the binding and may require lots of jvm calls.

So now i'm deciding whether I just force synchronous transfers for all array interfaces because they probably have some use despite synchronisation being the mind-killer, or just deleting them altogether to drop a ton of code. Since i've already got all the code the former will probably be the approach I take. The event callback stuff i'm using to finish up the transaction seems pretty expensive anyway so there may not be much net difference (against a net use count of zero for the library, at that - it's just something to pass the time).

On another note I decided to use cvs as my local repository backend to store this stuff. I think the all-day-never-finished checkout of gcc finally tipped me over but I never liked subversion because it's too slow and is just shit at merging. I was surprised netbeans detected it and offered to install the cvs plugin automatically (and i was a little surprised it was already installed too). I don't need or want to use tools that weren't designed for my use-case.

Ho hum, back to work Tuesday. My boss actually apologised for taking so long to get the contract sorted but yeah, i'm not complaining! Looks like it'll mostly be a continuation of one of the projects i'm not terribly keen on too. Bummer I guess. All I really care about right now is sleep though.

Update: (I kept poking) I just removed the async handling code and force a blocking call. Get/SetPrimitiveArrayCritical() is used to access the arrays directly. I'll do a release another day though.