Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 432 posts

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#51

Post by Grustaf »

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 now being a 100% Apple-sponsored & owned project again makes me a bit nervous.

Are you nervous about a language that is designed and supported by the largest and most successful company in the world?

> very niche market of 100% native mobile development

That "niche" is at least 1.5 billion devices. Devices bought by the 1.5 billion richest people in the world because they like them, not because their employers forced them to. Seems like a pretty ideal "niche".

But I wouldn't agree that "swift never worked server side". I've built several backends in Vapor and it's amazing.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#52

Post by favorited »

coolspot wrote: post #48
favorited wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, Clang then.

It’s started in the Univerity of Illinois, and still under their source code license.

No, that's where LLVM started. Clang was started from scratch at Apple to replace the GCC-LLVM frontend.

https://llvm.org/devmtg/2007-05/09-Naroff-CFE.pdf

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#53

Post by skohan »

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.

I was active in the Swift language community for a couple years, and I think it was not just a lack of encouragement, but rather a sense of neglect of use-cases outside the Apple ecosystem.

For instance, maybe it's fixed now, but for years running the Swift REPL on linux would spit out a few error messages every time you ran it. It still worked, but it gave the impression of being poorly supported.

What really killed it for me was the rollout of features like FunctionBuilders (now result builders) and property wrappers. These were just basically crammed into the language in a half-finished state with no community review, to support the requirements for SwiftUI, despite many other features languishing for years and not being implemented due to concerns about how they would affect swift's "design space".

Following that, I had the impression that Swift was and would always be prioritized towards Apple's goals, and any use-case outside of this would be a distant follower.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#54

Post by skohan »

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?

Theoretically if Swift was an extremely marketable language across many domains, there would be more qualified developers available to work on software for Apple products.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#55

Post by suyash »

wendyshu wrote: post #50
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…

What are some ways in which Python's type system should improve?

First, managing python dependencies and versions, current system is horrible. Focus on fixing that, then performance. Swift is much faster than Python. Third, Swift is a much advance and intelligent language to program in than Python. When I write Swift code, I feel like a PhD and when I write Python, I'm back in elementary school.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#56

Post by belval »

Swift for TensorFlow was a nice idea on paper, but you need more than ideas to push a project forward. You need people who actually want to use your product.

For all the comments on HN about how great Swift was, there were hundreds if not thousands of ML engineer and research scientist who did not know it existed and frankly did not really care about it either.

Swift for Tensorflow was not addressing the issues of ML in productions and felt like "Just another framework" but with the added handicap of needing its users to learn an entirely new language which is not something most scientists want to do. One might argue that engineering might be more interested, but in a lot of cases the science team will push the models and then the engineering team will put them in production, leaving very little room to migrate from TF/Pytorch to Swift for TF.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#57

Post by superbcarrot »

wendyshu wrote: post #50
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…

What are some ways in which Python's type system should improve?

It fundamentally can't be improved in a significant enough way and still be Python. The more realistic options are to be okay with Python's type system (I personally am) or to look at different languages if you really want something more robust.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#58

Post by chris_st »

wrinkl3 wrote: post #33
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.

I know AWS lets you just deploy a docker container, so you can use whatever tools you want -- anyone know about Azure and Google cloud?

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#59

Post by jimbokun »

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…

> is now a very niche market of 100% native mobile development.

Which just happens to be one of the biggest development niches in the world.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#60

Post by nextos »

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 love all languages in the ML/Haskell tradition, but I think Julia would have been a better fit because it's dynamic yet efficient, and because it has a really decent probability/statistics/ML ecosystem already. Long term, I think it's the best replacement we have for Python in the ML world.

Python has exceptional libraries but, as a language, it's a bit dated on several fronts. This has an impact on library design. In Python, ML libraries are huge monoliths and they depend on a lot of code written in other languages. They are really hard to understand or modify.

In Julia, things are really small and composable. For example, you have a probabilistic programming library like Turing and a differentiable programming one like Flux, and it's trivial to implement some Bayesian neural networks. Same applies to many other things. It's small and beautiful, but it needs more manpower to compete against Python.

Post reply on HN