MDSPAN - A Deep Dive Spanning C++, Kokkos and SYCL - Lecture 2022

Dive deep into the world of MDSPAN, a non-owning multidimensional array reference slated for C++23, in this comprehensive conference talk from CppCon 2022. Explore the history behind MDSPAN, tracing its roots to Kokkos::View, and understand the C++ standardization effort, including current status and tradeoffs made over time. Learn about language changes that support MDSPAN and discover how SYCL plans to leverage it in the future. Gain insights into the evolution of view/reference vocabulary types in C++, from string_view to span and the ranges library. Understand the critical role of MDSPAN in distributed and high-performance computing, particularly in CPU/GPU programming. Compare MDSPAN with Kokkos::View and Microsoft's abandoned array_view proposal. Follow the seven-year journey of the MDSPAN proposal through 17 revisions, and explore key language changes that improved its interface, such as the deprecation of the comma operator inside square brackets and the addition of the multidimensional subscript operator.