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Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

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Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#11

Post by nt591 »

mottiden wrote: post #10
bsaul wrote: post #6

Swift now being a 100% Apple-sponsored & owned project again makes me a bit nervous. Anyone knows if chris latner is at least using swift in his new company ? I have the feeling swift never really worked in the server side, data science is now officially a failure, and all that is left is now a very niche market of 100% native mobile development. I love this language, but i'm eager to see it handled by a proper found…

What do you mean by data science being a failure?

Presumably "Swift for data science" is a failure, not the idea of data science as a whole

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#14

Post by BadInformatics »

the_damn_nava wrote: post #3
pixel_tracing wrote: post #2

Wow this project had so much potential going for it. What does Chris Lattner have to say about this?

Same questions here, Jeez. Would love to know Jeremy Howard's too.

I remember an interview [1] with him a few months back where he seemed to have stopped pursuing it after Chris Lattner's departure. Sylvain Gugger, who was pretty involved in fastai and prototyping a Swift port, also left to join Huggingface a while ago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2V2kf2gNnI

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#16

Post by high_derivative »

S4TF from my (external) perspective was always more a (very cool!) programming language research project than anything else, at least since Lattner left.

I would personally assume the shutdown was due to a combination of reasons:

- There simply being no good reason for Python users to ever move to Swift. There is no big painpoint being solved for the broad ML user community

- Organisational momentum lost with Lattner leaving

- General disarray of TensorFlow as a project, the parallel rise of Jax from/within prominent Google orgs, it being the cool new thing

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#18

Post by MrPowers »

bsaul wrote: post #6

Swift now being a 100% Apple-sponsored & owned project again makes me a bit nervous. Anyone knows if chris latner is at least using swift in his new company ? I have the feeling swift never really worked in the server side, data science is now officially a failure, and all that is left is now a very niche market of 100% native mobile development. I love this language, but i'm eager to see it handled by a proper found…

It seemed like Swift looked like a promising language for data science a few years ago. I'm not familiar with Swift. Can anyone provide additional context as to why the language seemed promising for data?

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#19

Post by joeblau »

I'm looking through the meeting notes[1] linked from the archive PR[2] and it looks like there hasn't been much activity on the project recently. Can anyone with more insight provide an explanation on what happened?

[1] - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fm56p5rV1t2Euh6WLtBFKGqI...

[2] - https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/commit/1b1381ccb89a342ba...

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