Still no Windows support at the level of DirectML, or Julia.
Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
21–30 of 142 posts
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#22Who 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.
Swift is gaining momentum outside the Apple ecosystem. Web servers are being built and the Tensorflow team explains in length it’s advantages for developing ML models with it.
What momentum? Even IBM gave up on it.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#23I'm not sure this is really going to take off, it seems that most people who are abandoning TF are moving to Jax or pytorch. My own experience with Jax is that it is much easier to use then TF, just an all round more pleasant experience. It would be interesting to try this, but at this point I'm not really willing to learn 'yet another deep learning framework' and the extreme anti-user problems that TF had make me loath to give it another shot, even with a presumably better frontend. Moreover, I think that python is just a better all-round ML/data science language at this point. Has anyone tried both Jax and this and would be willing to give us their thoughts on strengths and weaknesses of each?
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#24Who 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.
Working on expanding it outside of the Apple/iOS ecosystem but many (probably most) developers use Mac. You can write Swift code in Linux right now. I’d also say that it appears that Swift is going to be a great language for machine learning. Things like calculating gradients are built in to the language and you can import Python to fill in gaps until Swift libraries are ready. And Swift is quite fast.
Try to use Framework code on Linux.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#25Should 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).
On HN circles maybe.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#26Careful, 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.
> since then most internal users lost interest
Why do you say so?
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#27Careful, 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?
I guess that the fact that Tensorflow 2020 conference had zero references to it, including on the related blog posts says it all.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#28I'm not sure this is really going to take off, it seems that most people who are abandoning TF are moving to Jax or pytorch. My own experience with Jax is that it is much easier to use then TF, just an all round more pleasant experience. It would be interesting to try this, but at this point I'm not really willing to learn 'yet another deep learning framework' and the extreme anti-user problems that TF had make me lo…
The subtext is Google would love even more Google projects to be ml prerequisites.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#29Careful, 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?
This website has been cached already
Re: Swift for TensorFlow – A system for deep learning and differentiable computing
#30Who 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.
I agree on the hardware part. MacOS only supports AMD GPUs which are unsupported by Tensor flow...