Should have used Julia instead. The choice was only because of the Chris Lattner who already left.
Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
11–20 of 142 posts
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#12Is this (future of tf is in swift) still the case? Because there have been speculation esp. when lattner left google.
Also projects like Jax has gained good momentum.
I guess it's really hard to convince scientist to move away off of their python legacy. And python scientific stack is really incredible.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#13Careful, folks. S4TF is pretty much dead on arrival. It was pushed aggressively by Chris Lattner (for obvious reasons) but he left Google a while ago and since then most internal users lost interest. There's nothing in Swift that's inherently suitable for ML and building the ecosystem is a ton of work; without all the political pushing, it went nowhere and is close to a "semi-abandoned research project" phase.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#14Last time I looked the automatic differentiation was in a compiler branch with no immediate plans to merge in master.
But overall it is promising. I even installed Swift on Linux to play with it, didn't get to ML as I have an AMD GPU and this is a can of worms. Hope it's finished one day.
I would prefer for Julia ml libraries to become mainstream. But, it is what it is.
Also, the ideal for me would be Rust for tensorflow, but the slower compile times (didn't compare with Swift) are an impediment for an iterative workflow such as tweaking models.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#15Careful, folks. S4TF is pretty much dead on arrival. It was pushed aggressively by Chris Lattner (for obvious reasons) but he left Google a while ago and since then most internal users lost interest. There's nothing in Swift that's inherently suitable for ML and building the ecosystem is a ton of work; without all the political pushing, it went nowhere and is close to a "semi-abandoned research project" phase.
“Stillborn” is a pretty awful term to use for software.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#16Who would want to use an Apple-centric language for ML, seriously? Apple hardware is outright incompatible to the kind of hardware we use daily in machine learning workstations.
That might change with Apple Silicon and Apple’s new ML Compute framework.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#17Careful, folks. S4TF is pretty much dead on arrival. It was pushed aggressively by Chris Lattner (for obvious reasons) but he left Google a while ago and since then most internal users lost interest. There's nothing in Swift that's inherently suitable for ML and building the ecosystem is a ton of work; without all the political pushing, it went nowhere and is close to a "semi-abandoned research project" phase.
Can you backup your claims?
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#18Careful, folks. S4TF is pretty much dead on arrival. It was pushed aggressively by Chris Lattner (for obvious reasons) but he left Google a while ago and since then most internal users lost interest. There's nothing in Swift that's inherently suitable for ML and building the ecosystem is a ton of work; without all the political pushing, it went nowhere and is close to a "semi-abandoned research project" phase.
“Stillborn” is a pretty awful term to use for software.
Mea culpa. Reworded.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#19I am not getting the exact usecase. If the speed is the issue, then I think tf.function solves that. For most of the operation we need to use python via pythonkit, so the things which can't be sped up using tf.function, can't be sped up using swift. Also if we need to use python everywhere, type safety is also very minor.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#20Should have used Julia instead. The choice was only because of the Chris Lattner who already left.
They presumably wanted a semi-popular statically typed language as the gains of Julia over Python aren't enough to be worth it (and Julia isn't popular enough).