Computer Science > Programming Languages
[Submitted on 13 Aug 2026]
Title:GPU Offload in Rust: Portable, Safe, and Fast
Authors:Manuel S. Drehwald, Marcelo Domínguez, Kevin Sala, Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Johannes Doerfert
View a PDF of the paper titled GPU Offload in Rust: Portable, Safe, and Fast, by Manuel S. Drehwald and 4 other authors
Abstract:High-performance GPU programming has traditionally forced a compromise between execution efficiency and memory safety. While Rust guarantees compile-time memory safety for host CPUs via its strict ownership model, applying these constraints to massively parallel GPU execution environments has previously mandated either vendor-locked Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) or escaping to explicit unsafe raw pointers. This paper presents a zero-overhead, multi-vendor GPU compilation framework built natively into the Rust compiler (rustc) and LLVM backends. We leverage Rust’s rich type system, ownership system, and strict aliasing guarantees (noalias) to efficiently manage and optimize data transfers through LLVM’s Offload infrastructure. We expose the technical challenges of cross-vendor ABI lowering mismatches between Host and Device targets and introduce a two-pass compilation pipeline capable of safely handling both manual and compiler-generated memory movements. Evaluating our framework on RAJAPerf demonstrates that our rustc-based solution can generate competitive LLVM IR for GPU kernels, achieving a solid kernel performance against native, hand-optimized CUDA and HIP C++ baselines.
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Programming Languages (cs.PL)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.13759 [cs.PL]
(or arXiv:2608.13759v1 [cs.PL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.13759
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Manuel Sebastian Drehwald [view email] [v1] Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:37:48 UTC (88 KB)
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