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Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

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Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#151

Post by skohan »

swagonomixxx wrote: post #136
skohan wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

> Having a half way decent type system solves so many problems What problems does it solve for you? When building ML applications I mean. Because that's what S4TF was supposed to be. ML researchers produce models that are used by ML applications for a particular purpose. The code to train the model _could_ be statically typed, sure, but I really don't see what the improvement would be. It would be more verbose, less…

My guess is that's because ML researchers typically have not spent much time with statically typed languages.

I was also once convinced that static typing was not so valuable - when I was working a lot with js, python and ruby, but the more time I spend with static typing the more I like it.

There is an "activation energy" to overcome with static typing: when you first start it feels like a tedious burden to have to add type annotations, when your python code ran just fine without them. But in my experience, with a little bit of practice the type system starts to feel completely effortless, and it saves you from all kinds of strange runtime issues you run into when nobody is checking your types.

Also type systems encode a lot of intention into the code. If I look at a function signature in Swift, I know exactly what has to be passed in, and exactly what will come out. In python, I have to rely on documentation, or even maybe I have to dig into the source to see what this function expects.

In my experience, the real difference is seen when you come back to a weakly-typed language after working with types for an extended period. Returning to Python after spending time with Rust or Swift feels like walking down the street with one of my senses missing. There are whole categories of dangers I now have to watch out for which the compiler would have caught for me automatically. It is not pleasant to go back.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#152

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

stephencanon wrote: post #143
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that we'll be seeing ObjC for a long time, as the lower-level system language for Apple devices. I know that Apple still uses it for much of their system programming. No idea if that's by choice, or legacy (possibly both). I was looking at the upcoming async/await stuff for Swift, and it's still not comparable to some of the lower-level threading systems. That said, I have not done system programming for a…

I'm a little bit confused by this comment. Obj-C is, in a lot of ways, the _higher_ level language on Apple systems now, and most of what I would consider "systems" programming on macOS and iOS is in C, assembly, and C++.

Probably right, but ObjC inherits C (and ObjC++ inherits C++), so you get all that low-level goodness, as well as the SmallTalk stuff.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#153

Post by onelovetwo »

cs702 wrote: post #119

S4TF lost out, not to Python, but to Python's AI/ML ecosystem -- people, projects, libraries, frameworks. Despite its many shortcomings, Python has become the lingua franca of AI and ML, to the point that whenever I come across a newly published AI or ML paper that I find interesting, I expect to be able to find code implementing it in Python. For example, yesterday I saw a post on HN about approximating self-attenti…

Its becoming like the same grasp js has on the web...which is sad to see.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#154

Post by liuliu »

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…

Yeah. I think unable to merge back into Swift mainline really makes the adoption harder. I made some efforts to having PythonKit / swift-jupyter run smoother and it feels really good as a replacement for Python: https://liuliu.me/eyes/data-science-setup-with-swift-in-2021...

Luckily, I don't think Swift on other platforms is dead. SwiftNIO seems worked quite well as a project. Bazel support is solid. They still release Linux / Windows Swift toolchains.

Also shameless plug, I did implemented my own deep learning framework in Swift: https://libnnc.org/s4nnc/

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#155

Post by ZeroCool2u »

nextos wrote: post #60
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.…

  function julia_blues(bummers...)
I largely agree, Julia is such a cool language and had so much potential. It definitely surprised me when they went with Swift instead, but realizing that Chris Lattner worked at Google at the time explained a lot. Unfortunately, every time I try to get into Julia, it just feels awkward coming from Python and a bit like stepping back in time.

The stupidest, (stupidest in the sense that I really wish they didn't bother me, because they're silly things!), things that bother me are:

1. The 'end' keyword. It's everywhere! Loops, if-else statements, function bodies. I mean I understand why it's helpful for parsing and providing more info to the compiler, but honestly, I would've rather we just stuck with curly braces '{}'! At least it's fewer characters to type and it just feels less crowded on screen while reading. It feels like such a petty complaint, but honestly, it feels like I'm writing Pascal or Matlab all over again. Which leads me to my second point.

2. The default choice of 1 based indexing. I'm not going to go into it, because plenty of people before me have beat this dead horse already[1][2][3], but I can't help but be saddened by this choice and its implications. It's important to acknowledge the fact that Julia started as a competitor to Matlab and Octav, so it makes sense from that perspective. However, it could have been a much more general purpose language, with huge performance benefits over popular interpreted languages like Python, JS, and Ruby. It could have been a unifying force in the scientific computing community, bridging the gap between R and Python users with a greenfield approach that would have been a force to be reckoned with. Instead, rightly or not, it's viewed largely as 'just' a matlab replacement.

Now, regardless of whether 1 or 0 based indexing is truly 'better' or the 'end' keyword is no big deal, the reality is that there's a huge demographic of potential users that won't buy into Julia, because it doesn't quite feel as ergonomic as Python/JS/Ruby and won't take it seriously as a general purpose language, because it looks/feels like Matlab and they only use 'real' programming languages. Again, I'm not saying this is right, but it is the reality we're faced with and it just feels like a huge missed opportunity and bums me out.

  end
1. https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16260#issuecomment-2... 2. https://groups.google.com/g/julia-dev/c/tNN72FnYbYQ?pli=1 3. https://github.com/julialang/julia/issues/558

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#157

Post by jamil7 »

iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #73
Grustaf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think there is too much focus on Swift as a general purpose language. I really enjoy working in it and it’s great at what it does, does it have to be deployed in every domain?

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#158

Post by xiaodai »

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…

Example of features you miss?

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#159

Post by Grustaf »

forgot-my-pw wrote: post #93
Grustaf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The Uber engineering disaster story from 2 months ago seems to suggest that Apple lacks dogfooding Swift internally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462

Apple is using Swift everywhere. Including SwiftUI.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#160

Post by jtdev »

astrange wrote: post #142
jtdev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, Swift has an obsession with functional programming that is just so off-putting to me and I suspect many others.

The type system is kind of sort of vaguely ML/Haskell-like despite looking like C. Is that what you mean? It certainly isn't a functional programming language. It's intentionally imperative.

Yes, Swift is fundamentally imperative... but it has functional concepts littered throughout in ways that are obtuse, unhelpful, and unavoidable.
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