How is swift for stuff beyond applications for the apple ecosystem?
Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
21–30 of 432 posts
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#22No surprises there. There were maybe a total of 5 people excited about adding automatic differentiation to Swift. Too bad they didn't try improving Julia instead.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#23I love Swift and it's potential for use cases beyond just iOS ecosystem, but I think Apple never fostered or encouraged the open source community to involve in its development.
It's another classic example where it's simply not enough to open source something, you have to really allow and encourage the developers to contribute to increase the adoption.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#24It would have been much more productive to improve the Kotlin programming language support instead.
Well, it's happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25128251
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#25Swift 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?
I disagree with the pitch, but the pitch I heard when this was announced was:
* Swift lets you write code that's as concise as Python while still being fast, and therefore allows you to get away from the problem of having to write ML code in multiple languages (TensorFlow is actually mostly C++, which makes it difficult for a Python developer to debug.)
* That the lack of static typing is a major pain point in Python, and Swift's type system would help write code with fewer errors.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#26It's a shame. I had high hopes at the beginning that S4TF - and the investment in Swift from Google - would help Swift break out of the iOS ghetto and cement it as a mainstream language.
Swift's a delightful language to use. It has a lot of the nice things about Rust's type system, but is a heck of a lot easier to use at the expense of a bit of performance. For a lot of use cases, I think this is a great value proposition. ML/data science is a great example where practitioners could benefit from a more grown-up type system than what Python has on offer, but would still be able to keep low level details at arms length.
I think Serverless would be another ideal use-case for Swift, where the productivity, clarity and correctness tools it offers would be a huge benefit.
Some very interesting things came out of the S4TF project - like the work on autodiff, and python interop. It's a shame the project never really seemed to get legs, it seems like it just languished for years with no clear direction.
These days I do most of my work in Rust, and I'm happy to do so because the tooling, community, and ecosystem is really amazing. But there are a lot of language concepts and features I miss from swift. I guess it goes to show that the governance and availability of a language have a lot more to do with adoption than the merits of the language itself.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#27Swift 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…
>a very niche market of 100% native mobile development
I mean, it also works for native desktop development. And is there really an issue with that? Objective-C basically had no reason to exist beyond iOS/Mac programming and at least now we don't have god damn [myString stringByAppendingString:@"another string"].
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#28Swift for tensorflow never made any sense. I remember only reason it started was one main developer on team liked swift.
Tensorflow for nodejs makes much more sense, node community is lit bigger and not sponsored by big corp.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#29Swift compared to Python was getting way too complex. Why would anyone learn Swift for data science when Python will do?
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#30No surprises there. There were maybe a total of 5 people excited about adding automatic differentiation to Swift. Too bad they didn't try improving Julia instead.
I remember their terrible article trying to justify why Swift was the right choice out of a load of more appropriate languages. I'm still annoyed they didn't go with Julia.