Questions as to the status of Rust-GPU, including Open Funding for the Rust-GPU project

[JordanLloydHall]

Hello,
Huge thanks to all of the contributors of this whole project (including Rust-CUDA) for their work in making GPGPU-programming essentially possible in Rust.

I have noticed that GPGPU projects in the Rust ecosystem tend to have a high amount of turnover. Which makes sense given the scope of the task is rather huge, and most do not receive enough resources to make the insane amount of work possible. Furthermore, most do not get past the "essentially possible" stage of development, whereby the only people really capable of using the project is the maintainers, and anybody willing to read and reverse-engineer the project source code. Examples are often bare-bones, documentation lacks, there's no real use of the project in the real world, it lacks a central space for the community to discuss at reasonable pace, etc.

Off of the back of this, I see Rust-GPU as having a huge amount of potential, similar to the impact that the Bevy game engine had on game development in Rust. I really want this project to succeed, but I am not capable of being a direct contributor to ensure this. Bevy recently incorporated as a charity, to much success. I believe as a model for OSS, this is the best way to quickly gain resource and traction within a community, as well as having in-depth documentation, an open vision for the future, a place for the community to gather, etc.

I myself, and I imagine others, would be more than willing to contribute to this as a charity. I imagine you have considered this, and it would be great if the project could share its view on the matter. I don't believe having a developed project is necessary for this, as it would make it a chicken-and-egg problem that other projects face.

There are a few other things that would be great to have an idea of. Apologies if this is written elsewhere, I have read over the majority of the relevant blog posts, and couldn't find anything:

• What's the status of documentation? Aside from the book, which lacks how to use the project by non-enthusiasts, there's not a lot of user-level documentation.
• Is there a space for the community to gather? The Bevy project's discord is by far the best place I have ever landed for support, community discussion, and traction.
• What would be the long-term vision? The recent Rust-CUDA update blog post was excellent, and it would be great to have updates for the whole project as well.
• What are the community advertisement/drives? To date, there are 22 contributors to the project, which is awesome! And I see there are a call for contributors on each blog post, but there's not a lot of information about how someone can get involved (both as a user and a core contributor as far as I can tell). I would be incredibly willing to write in-depth examples and user-level documentation from how I use this project. A "community" section of the websites, for 3rd-party blogs, examples, etc, would be great for this as well!
• How can I help? I'm not a GPU programming expert, right now I have a few projects which compile CUDA C++ via cudarc to host in Rust. My goal is to migrate these to rust-gpu, and write about the experience if I can.

Thank you all once again for your effort in the project. I really hope this goes well! And I hope I'm able to help out somehow along the way.

Many thanks,
Jordan