(This project has been abandoned as I have shifted my focus to other responsibilities. Upcaste was a testbed to explore various ideas in software portability abstraction layer design. Things have changed a lot in the past 4-5 years and there are many new options available. If I were to take a stab at this again, I'd simplify things greatly by targetting only C++17 & POSIX.1-2008. For Windows, a transparent compatability layer could be created around the Universal CRT.)
Upcaste is a collection of optimized source libraries that provide a foundation
for graphical, visual, and heterogeneous computing using OpenCL. Upcaste is
released under the MIT License, with additional restrictions for certain
included components (see LICENSE.md).
Upcaste has been heavily influenced by data-oriented and functional design principles in order to maximize software performance. In essence of this, it is written primarily in a "back-to-basics" subset of C++, which favors explicit code using free functions and POD types over that of rich class hierarchies. Think of it as C with stronger typing, namespaces, lambda functions, compile-time templates, and a few other useful C++11 features. On the rare occasion, classes and virtual member functions may be used in the implementation of certain subsystems, but only because they happen to be the best tool for the job in each particular case.
This project is in an early and experimental phase, and a lot its interfaces are highly unstable.
Currently only the Upcaste core library, upcore, is in a semi-useable state on Windows using MSVC++ 2012. Ports to other platforms and compilers is a work-in-progress. The core library provides a portable wrapper layer for most Standard C library facilities, some additional POSIX layer functions, and other base level functions and data structures.
The upsystem library is currently in the planning stages and will provide features for configuring and initializing an OpenCL / OpenGL / Direct3D environment, for managing task-oriented flow control across compute devices, and for high-performance filesystem streaming and data caching.