The Next Big Programming Language You've Never Heard Of

At the International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (2022), scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) published a research paper titled, 'Exocompilation for productive programming of hardware accelerators' that proposes a new programming language, 'Exo', which can be used for writing high-performance code on hardware accelerators. Exo is a domain-specific programming language that helps low-level performance engineers transform very simple programs which specify what they want to compute into very complex programs that do the same thing as the specification but much faster. It is both a programming language and a compiler and allows custom hardware instructions, specialised memories and accelerator configuration states to be defined in user libraries. Exo builds on the idea of user scheduling to externalise hardware mapping and optimisation decisions. Accelerators like GPUs and image signal processors play an increasingly important role in modern computer systems.