title: Best practices for string processing on the GPU?
body: <p>I was wondering just how realistic is it to process strings, rather than numerics, on the GPU? Specifically, what I'm interested in is using C++ AMP to perform comparisons between an array of strings and a target string.</p>
  
  <p>I've started with basics such as passing a <code>wchar_t* strings[]</code> into a function, but it turns out that you cannot even create a view with a type smaller than an <code>int</code>!</p>
  
  <p>So my question is - are there any best practices out there, or is this generally a bad idea? I'm also interested in things like warp divergence - for instance, how efficient would it be to compute string lengths on a large array?</p>