Question

Several CUDA function names have the word Symbol in them.

e.g. cudaMemcpyToSymbol() , cudaMemcpyFromSymbol(), cudaGetSymbolAddress() etc. 

The explanation of what these functions do is clear enough in the Programming guide. What I
dont get is the choice of the word “symbol” in naming these functions. What does it mean?

Answer 1

They use the word “symbol” because it is possible for these functions to take the name of a device variable as a string. For instance:

cudaMemcpyToSymbol("my_var_d", my_var_h, sizeof(my_var_d));

Presumably, this strange syntax allows some use case that I have yet to think of 🙂