Open standards underpin the future of heterogeneous programming, and as Intel Principal Engineer Jeff Hammond points out, SYCL has proven in many ways that “standards don’t cost you a thing and you get portability.” A modern C++ language, SYCL has demonstrated amazing growth and now boasts four implementations—ComputeCpp, triSYCL, hipSYCL and DPC++. hipSYCL Creator Aksel Alpay explains some of the differences between these implementations, and how hipSYCL is evolving to incorporate DPC++ features contributed to the SYCL 2020 specification, including unified shared memory (USM), reductions, group algorithms and subgroups. The two also dive into a discussion of buffers and accessors, and Aksel debunks a few myths around hipSYCL.