What's the Android's Renderscript equivalent for iOS and Windows Phone?

Question

Renderscript is an Android computation engine that lets you use CPU/GPU native hardware acceleration in order to boost applications, for example in image processing and computer vision algorithms.

Is there a similar thing in iOS and Windows Phone 7/8?

Answer 1

I can't speak for Windows Phone but on iOS it would be Apple Metal, its language specification being almost same as renderscript c99.

Answer 2

For iOS it is the newly introduced swift I guess.

Maybe it is worth to try it out, but I'm not an iOS developer so I can't say anything about its performance, but the demos on the WWDC looked promising. Also instead of Renderscript Swift seemes to be designed for graphics, the Renderscript soppurt for graphics has been deprecated and Renderscript turned more into a general computation framework (which of course can be used as a backend for graphic calculations).

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/swift/conceptual/swift_programming_language/TheBasics.html

Answer 3

I can't speak for Windows Phone but on iOS it would be vImage running on the Accelerate Framework. Just like Renderscript, it is dynamically optimized for the CPU on the target platform.

vImage optimizes image processing by using the CPU’s vector processor. If a vector processor is not available, vImage uses the next best available option. This framework allows you to reap the benefits of vector processors without the need to write vectorized code.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/performance/Conceptual/vImage/Introduction/Introduction.html

Answer 4

The RenderScript compatibility library is designed to compile for most any posix system. It would be very easy to get it running on other platforms.