Microsoft Announces C++ AMP Open Specification

We all know concurrency programming can be a pain, so why not make it easier on yourself?  Back in June of 2011, Microsoft was already talking about its future release of C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP), a new specification to be implemented in Visual Studio 11 and released as open source:

C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism) is a native-programming model that contains elements that span the C++ programming language and its runtime library. It provides an easy way to write programs that compile and execute on data-parallel hardware such as graphics cards (GPUs).

-- Microsoft

Built on the Windows DirectX platform and expected to be part of the next Visual C++ compiler, this is not only a great new tool for the upcoming Visual Studio 11 release, as previously mentioned, it's also an open specification:

Microsoft announced publication, under the Microsoft Community Promise license, of the C++ AMP open specification. This release means compiler developers and vendors now have the ability to implement C++ AMP in their compilers, just as Microsoft has done, broadening access for C++ developers everywhere to the possibilities offered by heterogeneous hardware.

-- S. Somasegar

For more information on the upcoming Visual Studio 11 release, read S. Somasegar's recent blogpost Visual Studio 11 Programming Language Advances.

You can read the release on the new Language and Programming model here.