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Why Swift for TensorFlow?

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Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#11

Post by tempdeadbeef »

elpakal wrote: post #5

I also wonder how much of this coincidentally lines up with Chris Lattner landing at Google. As Chris will admit, and as was left out of this analysis, Swift has also been given the humble goal of achieving world domination. All joking aside I'm very thrilled about this and have enjoyed tremendously watching the Swift language mature since its launch due in large part to the open source community and the Swift team's…

http://nondot.org/sabre/Resume.html

"Swift for TensorFlow rethinks machine learning development ... I imagined, advocated for, coded the initial prototype and many of the subsystems after that; recruited, hired and trained an exceptional engineering team; we drove it to an open source launch and are continuing to build out and iterate on infrastructure."

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#12

Post by coldtea »

igotsideas wrote: post #8

Well written explanation! I really enjoy Swift but it's not as accessible as some of the other languages mentioned. I have a 2011 Macbook Pro and wanted to use the latest and greatest new Swift features. Unfortunately, my machine is too old to upgrade to Mojave which means I can't download the latest version of xcode, which means no new version of Swift. I'm not mad at Apple in the least bit. I just wish I could use…

Isn't Swift open source and available to build anyway, regardless of Xcode and OS X version? Even on Linux etc?

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#13

Post by delinka »

igotsideas wrote: post #8

Well written explanation! I really enjoy Swift but it's not as accessible as some of the other languages mentioned. I have a 2011 Macbook Pro and wanted to use the latest and greatest new Swift features. Unfortunately, my machine is too old to upgrade to Mojave which means I can't download the latest version of xcode, which means no new version of Swift. I'm not mad at Apple in the least bit. I just wish I could use…

Have you considered trying to build Swift from source? It's a bit time-consuming the first time, but subsequent updates less so - and you'd have Swift 4 at your disposal.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#15

Post by stephencanon »

igotsideas wrote: post #8

Well written explanation! I really enjoy Swift but it's not as accessible as some of the other languages mentioned. I have a 2011 Macbook Pro and wanted to use the latest and greatest new Swift features. Unfortunately, my machine is too old to upgrade to Mojave which means I can't download the latest version of xcode, which means no new version of Swift. I'm not mad at Apple in the least bit. I just wish I could use…

FWIW, you can install Xcode 10.1 on High Sierra, and use the Swift.org 5.0 toolchain (https://swift.org/download/#snapshots) or build swift from source. You can't ship App Store apps this way, but it works great for experiments.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#16

Post by FridgeSeal »

adamnemecek wrote: post #3

I can imagine swift really taking off in this space. It’s going to be a battle between Julia and Swift for who does the best automatic differentiation.

I’m happy for Swift, but I really, really want Julia to win out here.

There’s some pretty impressive ML frameworks in Julia and the language can do some really cool things, so I’m hoping that gives it the edge.

Plus, I found tensorflow exceedingly painful to use, so hopefully something else prevails.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#20

Post by criddell »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #17

Why not Rust? Edit: I wonder if Swift could be replaced with Rust for iOS development?

From the article:

We believe that Rust supports all the ingredients necessary to implement the techniques in this paper: it has a strong static side, and its traits system supports zero-cost abstractions which can be provably eliminated by the compiler. It has a great pointer aliasing model, a suitable mid-level IR, a vibrant and engaging community, and a great open language evolution process.

A concern with using Rust is that a strong goal of this project is to appeal to the entire TensorFlow community, which is currently pervasively Python based. We love Rust, but it has a steep learning curve that may exclude data scientists and other non-expert programmers who frequently use TensorFlow. The ownership model is really great, but mostly irrelevant to the problems faced by today’s machine learning code implemented in Python.

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