Show HN: Carton – Run any ML model from any programming language

> ONNX converts models while Carton wraps them. Carton uses the underlying framework (e.g. PyTorch) to actually execute a model under the hood. This is important because it makes it easy to use custom ops, TensorRT, etc without changes. For some sophisticated models, "conversion" steps (e.g. to ONNX) can be problematic and require additional validation. By removing these conversion steps, Carton enables faster experimentation, deployment, and iteration.

> With that said, we plan to support ONNX models within Carton. This lets you use ONNX if you choose and it enables some interesting use cases (like running models in-browser with WASM).

More broadly, Carton can compose with other interesting technologies in ways ONNX isn't able to because ONNX is an inference engine while Carton is an abstraction layer.

*As long as that language is python or rust.

What I think is that this is nothing more than a resume-bolstering effort that doesn't really need to exist and probably won't once OP lands a role at whatever FAANG company they're trying to impress.

We all think this. My initial thought was that this is probably a startup selling PyTorch-as-a-Service, and I did not bother to read the article. It turns out that I was wrong, and this might even be useful -- if not for the implementation, then perhaps for the idea.

However, it turns out to make Hacker News a nicer space if we follow these guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

The selling point of this thing is cross-language interoperability, and while they advertise it, they don't deliver.

Sorry, but if your "any language" is "Python or Javascript" your project hasn't even reached the proof of concept stage, it's just a vague idea at this point.

Supporting C++ and C will be 90% of the work and the real challenge.