[dsharlet]

I don't think it's true at all, you can just write C/C++ with SIMD intrinsics, just like you can on ARM or x86, and the instruction set is mostly awesome. OpenCL would just be an extra layer to get in the way. If you want to just run some existing OpenCL code, I guess that would be nice, but I doubt any OpenCL code written for a GPU would actually run well on Hexagon anyways.

The article also complains about VLIW in the same paragraph, but I don't think VLIW makes things harder, it just makes problems more obvious. If you write ARM or x86 code that has dependencies between every instruction, that's going to suck too, you just won't know it until you run it, but VLIW will make it obvious if you just look at the generated code. For the kinds of programs that make sense to run on a processor like Hexagon, VLIW is fine.

The whole Hexagon environment is just so much better than any of the other similar DSPs I'm aware of: you can use open source LLVM to compile code for it (so you aren't stuck with an old version of GCC), and the OS is much closer to standard (e.g. thread synchronization is just pthreads).

I did a bunch of work on Hexagon and I like it a lot. It is my favorite in its class.