Oh yeah, knowing the difference between the runtime API and driver API is definitely an issue, and there is common confusion around that. But that’s not an overloaded word problem, right? I wasn’t trying to say there’s no confusion, and I do think understanding the terms in the article is super helpful. To your point, I think there’s justification for needing a codex like this article has without framing it as an overloaded terminology problem.
"The CUDA "driver version" looks like the CUDA runtime version - so what's the difference?" https://stackoverflow.com/q/40589814/1593077
or consider the version you get when you run nvidia-smi, versus the version you get when you run nvcc --version. Those are very different numbers...
The compatibility between different versions of the driver and the toolkit is also a cause for some headaches in my experience.