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Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

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Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#321

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

sida wrote: post #316
freedomben wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia is fascinating to me, and I don't do any ML (currently). Julia seems like such a well designed language. I'm excited to see where it goes.

As weird as it sounds, the only thing that stops me from trying Julia is 1 indexing

IMO, Julia is good enough that you might not notice. you can use constructions like `for i in axes(V)` that will automatically give you the indexes, or `V[begin:begin+2]` to get the first 2 elements. Also higher order functions eg. `map` (and broadcasting) mean that you will rarely be manually working with indexes.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#322

Post by bsaul »

cutler wrote: post #299
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…

I don't get the hype about Swift. There are at least 4 features in Swift I can think of that are just plain clunky: 1. Backslashed opening parens for string templating 2. Parameter labels and the use of _ when ignored 3. Splitting method names across opening parens eg. `move (to ....` 4. Verbose NSString Objective-C hangover in regular expressions

Those are really minor syntax details (except maybe the regex stuff, that’s more a library issue than a language one).

Swift is safe (no null pointer exception), has predictable garbage collection performance through ARC, has a familiar C-style syntax (easier to get on-board), has compile-time type checking, good-enough generic programming support, algebraic data types with pattern matching, and will very soon get actor support.

Plus, it has the potential to become a good cross-platform language since it’s using llvm, all it needs is a bit more love on tooling and libraries.

I don’t see many other languages with those characteristics..

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#323

Post by bsaul »

jdmcd wrote: post #92
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…

> I have the feeling swift never really worked in the server side Vapor [1] is wonderful to work with and has a large user base. Apple is also putting significant resources into Server Side Swift with Swift NIO [2]. Lots of really cool stuff happening in that ecosystem [1]: https://vapor.codes [2]: https://github.com/apple/swift-nio

I don’t think swift’s performance is good enough to really make a dent in that area vs rust/java and C. Nor are its macro-programming ability enough to compete with dynamic (and slow) languages.

Now there’s still go market of « server middleware ». But for that it would need a much higher quality of core libraries, tooling, and a much better concurrency story. Maybe it’ll come with the incoming actors, but somehow i doubt it (the underlying concurrency libraries remaing grand central dispatch, which looks too heavy compared to, for ex, goroutines)

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#324

Post by krumbie »

sida wrote: post #316
freedomben wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia is fascinating to me, and I don't do any ML (currently). Julia seems like such a well designed language. I'm excited to see where it goes.

As weird as it sounds, the only thing that stops me from trying Julia is 1 indexing

Because you believe that you can't get used to a different convention? It gets brought up a lot that for array offsets, zero based is more natural. In my experience, the amount of index calculations you need in Julia is minimal anyway because there are really nice abstractions for n-dimensional indexing.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#326

Post by pjmlp »

jl2718 wrote: post #224
amkkma wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely not possible. These have to be rewritten with the specific autodiff /ML framework in mind. Even then, you're not going to have fast custom types to be used on the GPU without dropping into C++

Maybe Numba with Enzyme will catch up to Julia’s features before Julia catches up to Python’s users. I think the reason why people use python is because it’s the only universally-accepted language for coding interviews.

Only interviews for Python related jobs.

I am not asking anyone to write Python when it isn't part of the job.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#327

Post by pjmlp »

sida wrote: post #316
freedomben wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia is fascinating to me, and I don't do any ML (currently). Julia seems like such a well designed language. I'm excited to see where it goes.

As weird as it sounds, the only thing that stops me from trying Julia is 1 indexing

The beautiful thing of having polyglot experience, since the days when C was just another language trying to get users, is not being put down by minutia like that.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#328

Post by nestorD »

arensc wrote: post #237

Every time I see a post, about TensorFlow for Swift. There seems to be so many misconceptions about why this it was created. The top one being, oh it's Chris L's baby. As a Software Engineer, who's been working on teams for the past 15 years and seeing the craft devolve, and the market saturate with people whom don't understand that fundamentals but memorize the frameworks, you need a language like Swift to bridge th…

Most people regret that Google did not invest in Julia but, to my mind, it misses the point. Swift for TensorFlow's unique selling point was bringing a strong type system and ML+autodiferentiation together. That, for me, would be a huge boost to push ML code to production quality.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#329

Post by pjmlp »

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 lovers have to grasp that unless Apple actually puts the effort like Microsoft started doing with .NET, it is going to be used outside Apple eco-system as much as Objective-C has been used in the last 30 years.

There is no way out of it.

Re: Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down

#330

Post by nestorD »

> Added language-integrated differentiable programming into the Swift language. This work continues in the official Swift compiler.

While the readme tells us that the project is in archive mode, it also tells us that the differentiable programming part is still worked on by the compiler team. Is there further information on that?

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