OpenCL

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2011–2025), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with OpenCL, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

Much harder to use than CUDA; poor documentation and frustrating to port code2025-04-01
AMD's OpenCL implementations were unusable, according to the commenter's past experience2024-02-23
Hard to set up, with limited support, making it almost unusable2023-10-22
Commenter gave up because the linked AMD OpenCL setup instructions were too confusing2023-10-06
OpenCL on AMD GPU made the system completely unstable2023-07-08
Docs run out after a few hours and there's no good example code to learn from2023-06-13
Getting started with OpenCL requires a horrendous amount of boilerplate code2023-02-18
Writing OpenCL code is a painful experience compared to CUDA2022-10-06
Hard lockups, memory leaks, and no descriptive errors make developers give up2022-09-21
GPU rendering shows solid black boxes and debugging features lock up the computer2021-11-26
AMD's OpenCL implementation was unusable, with only printf for debugging2021-06-01
Can't tell whether the GPU is actually being used or silently falling back to CPU2020-08-02
Lacks tutorials and docs, so the author couldn't get a first program working2019-11-28
Hard to program for and hard to make efficient, with poor tooling2017-11-06
Programming in OpenCL is complex and hard to work with2011-11-16