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Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

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Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#31

Post by echelon »

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…

Swift never had a good outside-Apple story. Apple isn't the sort of company that jumps at opening up its platform or tooling for non-Apple uses.

There's nothing wrong with this. Swift can be the best language for the Apple platform and find lots of success in that.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#33

Post by wrinkl3 »

skohan wrote: post #26

It'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 propos…

> 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.

I agree, but sadly none of the big cloud providers has any interest in pushing it - Google's got Go, AWS and Azure seem focused on Typescript.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#34

Post by Hamuko »

meteor333 wrote: post #23

I 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.

What's Apple's incentive to do so?

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#35

Post by saagarjha »

echelon wrote: post #31
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…

Swift never had a good outside-Apple story. Apple isn't the sort of company that jumps at opening up its platform or tooling for non-Apple uses. There's nothing wrong with this. Swift can be the best language for the Apple platform and find lots of success in that.

LLVM? WebKit?

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#36

Post by skohan »

high_derivative wrote: post #16

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…

- 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

As a swift and python user, I would have been really happy to be able to use swift for ML applications. Having a half way decent type system solves so many problems. But while I can see that from my vantage point, I know for a vast majority of the ML community python is "good enough" and there would be quite a lot of inertia to overcome in that regard which is probably not realistic.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#37

Post by darzu »

Hamuko wrote: post #34
meteor333 wrote: post #23

I 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.

What's Apple's incentive to do so?

Same as MSFT's with C#?

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#38

Post by tsegratis »

saagarjha wrote: post #35
echelon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift never had a good outside-Apple story. Apple isn't the sort of company that jumps at opening up its platform or tooling for non-Apple uses. There's nothing wrong with this. Swift can be the best language for the Apple platform and find lots of success in that.

LLVM? WebKit?

Neither originated with Apple, though I agree Apple did a lot to push them and make them what they are

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#39

Post by echelon »

saagarjha wrote: post #35
echelon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift never had a good outside-Apple story. Apple isn't the sort of company that jumps at opening up its platform or tooling for non-Apple uses. There's nothing wrong with this. Swift can be the best language for the Apple platform and find lots of success in that.

LLVM? WebKit?

WebKit got forked into Blink, which is no longer under Apple leadership. Brave, Chromium, and the other major KHTML-derived browsers adopted this.

I can think of dozens of examples from Microsoft and Google, which are more "outside ecosystem" inclusive as a means of gaining mindshare. TypeScript, Golang, Visual Studio Code, protobuf, gRPC, ...

Other companies think of the things living outside their moat more flexibly, or their moats are less rigid. That's not to say that Apple's approach is wrong (look at their market cap!), but it has different consequences in terms of the open source code mindshare they cultivate.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#40

Post by xiphias2 »

ipsum2 wrote: post #22

No 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.

While I love using Julia for many things, I prefer having a Python monoculture for AI to be able to mix and match different algorithms.

At the end the engine that compiles the mathematical expression to hardware is what matters, and I don't think that LLVM IR that uses is the best IR for the optimizations.

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