I’m not saying that VSCode is the snappiest editor out there but for all its flaws it’s still the most responsive editor for my use case on moderately sized CUDA/HIP projects.

Unrelated but are you back at the Big Green? Curious about what they have you working on.

HIP is definitely a viable option. In fact with some effort you can port large CUDA projects to be compilable with the HIP/ AMD-clang toolchain. This way you don’t have to rewrite the world from scratch in a new language but still be able to run GPU workloads on AMD hardware.

What would differentiate this from AMD’s clang based HIP compiler https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIP/en/latest/ ?

They have a comparisons page, i don't know enough to summarise. https://docs.scale-lang.com/manual/comparison/