Swift compared to Python was getting way too complex. Why would anyone learn Swift for data science when Python will do?
Agreed, Swift has an obsession with functional programming that is just so off-putting to me and I suspect many others.
Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
71–80 of 432 posts
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#72Swift 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…
Don't worry, in a few years Apple will rewrite all their SDKs again in a different language. The churn may not be a deliberate strategy but it is certainly very effective in locking developers in.
Apple churns languages every few years? They kept Objective-C around for 13 years before introducing Swift, and that was a language that was widely disliked by people from outside the Apple ecosystem. You can still use it for the vast majority of OS features today[0], nearly 20 years after it was first used on Apple platforms. Heck, Obj-C is used for Mac/iOS development because that was the preferred language for Mac OS X's immediate ancestor, NextSTEP, which means that it's been a part of the same development ecosystem for about 30 years. If this is churn, I think I'm okay with it.
[0] As far as I know, the only system feature that requires Swift is iOS 14/macOS 11's new widgets, which must be written in SwiftUI.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#73Swift 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 employer…
> Are you nervous about a language that is designed and supported by the largest and most successful company in the world?
Yes, I am. The concentration of power between facebook and google for ML frameworks is worrying enough, but to their credit, they have so far been very open and collaborative and are giving a lot back to the ML community in terms of research
Apple on the other hand is the dictionary definition of walled garden. Their controlling and insular nature has been the reason for their success, and power to them, but for something as fast moving and community driven as machine learning, I would be very wary if relying on them for any part of it.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But hasn't Apple managed to force a lot of developers to pick up the language anyways?
Apple is one of the most successful organizations on the planet, and yes they have plenty of developers in tow. I am just trying to give an example of how it could help their bottom line to push open source swift more aggressively.
If I had to guess, they don't do it because:
1. they don't think the resources it would take would represent a good ROI,
2. and/or they think it's good for them that developers who invest in their ecosystem have skills which are not transferrable to other domains
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#75Swift 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…
Don't worry, in a few years Apple will rewrite all their SDKs again in a different language. The churn may not be a deliberate strategy but it is certainly very effective in locking developers in.
[deleted]
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#76It'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. Oh yes, I would love to have Swift framework for Firebase on server, not only for iOS. Its atrocity to write the server logic in NodeJS after making the user App in Swift. Every time I switch from Swift to JS I deeply appreciate the beauty of Swift. On swift I do much…
It doesn’t solve the issue of JS but NestJS feels like a more robust way to make a server in JS - and the docs are great.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#77No 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.
Source? Curious to read that :D
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#78No 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.
> I prefer having a Python monoculture for AI to be able to mix and match different algorithms
Given how divergent the current crop of ML frameworks are, is this really a realistic expectation? Having played around with Julia and Flux for ML, I find I have to do just as much rewriting when translating e.g. TF -> Flux as TF -> PyTorch. You get some limited mixing and matching with Caffe2 Torch and TF JAX, but that breaks down the moment you leave a company's walled garden.
> I don't think that LLVM IR that uses is the best IR for the optimizations.
I think Chris Lattner agrees, which is why he also helped start https://mlir.llvm.org/. If anything, I predict we'll see more frameworks targeting it (prototypes for Numpy, PyTorch, TF and general XLA already exist). This implies that languages that target LLVM now will actually have a leg up because their compiled semantics can be more easily lowered to something accelerator-friendly.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
- 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 "g…
I'm not sure if the Swift type system is half way decent in terms of machine learning applications. At least not without a lot of work. The data tends to be in specialized in-memory formats that tend to be opaque to the type system. The actual matrix operations involve dimension parameters that are likewise opaque to most type systems. So you still need to run code for the actual tensor graph compilation to validate…
I don't see any reason the swift type system could not accommodate the types required for ML. I did a lot of work with computer graphics in Swift, which is all linear algebra also, and the type system was a huge benefit.
Also I don't see why Swift would perform worse than python in any case. If python is fast, it's because it's wrapping a C++ library. There's no reason Swift could not wrap the same library, but on top Swift could communicate better type information back to the user.
Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
#80Wow this project had so much potential going for it. What does Chris Lattner have to say about this?
He left Google a while ago, so I doubt he’s surprised.