I think projects like this one are a clear indication that CUDA *is* the de facto standard and that aspiring open standards are competing for their niche. The rest of the world is still living in the CUDA ecosystem. Asking accelerated HPC devs to port every project to a different language (and possibly maintain two codebases) is something we haven't asked of anyone else for decades now. And yes, LLMs can help (although CUDA makes up the overwhelming majority of their training data, with the hilarious result that you need to give them a disambiguation table like "you'll want to write $CUDA, but write $else"), but AI is clearly not the correct tool for the job. A compiler is.

ZLUDA is JIT (it's working with the binary, not the source, which usually means you've lost some information) and it doesn't support CDNA, which is a showstopper for enterprises, tho it's a great project and it's awesome seeing it work on Windows (I wonder whether MS Defender complains about it due to library injection? IIRC, it used to. That'd be another enterprise showstopper)

Someone here mentioned scale-lang.com already as a portability tool - it also beats HIP in the performance game, on average. scale-lang.com/s/discord is where its community lives.

disclaimer: I am part of SCALE's team, Spectral Compute