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The APL Challenge

challenge.dyalog.com

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Re: The APL Challenge

#11

Post by xelxebar »

whitten wrote: post #6

Has anyone tried to recreate LLMs in APL ? Matrix multiplication is common in both of them. If LLAMA.C is only a few hundred lines then I would be surprised if the APL is more than a page of code.

A page? I sure hope not. The whole training and inference code for a U-Net architecture in APL is only about 30 lines, with inference direction only taking up 4 or so lines. Assuming you know APL, the code is actually really straightforward and readable, too! Not to mention that it's only ~2.5x slower than a comparable PyTorch implementation.

[0]:https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/conference/dyalog22/presentat...

Re: The APL Challenge

#14

Post by adrian_b »

whitten wrote: post #5
natas wrote: post #2

Man I wish I could use APL at work instead of python & nodejs.

What aspects of APL do you want to use at your job ?

I do not know about the previous poster, but anyone who knows about APL finds annoying to write tons of superfluous lines of code imposed by the syntax of most popular programming languages in order to express loops, instead of using only high-level array operations, which say only what must be done, without repeating the details well known by any programmer or compiler, about how to do that.

Re: The APL Challenge

#15

Post by jodrellblank »

upghost wrote: post #4
natas wrote: post #2

Man I wish I could use APL at work instead of python & nodejs.

You can embed GNU APL. I did it once with Clojure[1], tho it wasn't too popular. If they hired you to do Python should probably do that instead of embedding APL into Python. (I don't follow my own advice) I would love to embed Dyalog but last time I tried I wasn't smart enough. If anyone from Dyalog feels like throwing cycles at it let me know! [1] https://github.com/jjtolton/libapl-clj

Dyalog is a .Net language do you can write classes in APL and export DLLs that you can use from C# or F# from something like ASP.Net web servers.

Re: The APL Challenge

#17

Post by upghost »

jodrellblank wrote: post #15
upghost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can embed GNU APL. I did it once with Clojure[1], tho it wasn't too popular. If they hired you to do Python should probably do that instead of embedding APL into Python. (I don't follow my own advice) I would love to embed Dyalog but last time I tried I wasn't smart enough. If anyone from Dyalog feels like throwing cycles at it let me know! [1] https://github.com/jjtolton/libapl-clj

Dyalog is a .Net language do you can write classes in APL and export DLLs that you can use from C# or F# from something like ASP.Net web servers.

Very cool! I don't quite know how I would use that to fully embed Dyalog. Very large class..?

Re: The APL Challenge

#18

Post by upghost »

xelxebar wrote: post #12

APL Discord is quite active: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums Dyalog actually allocates respectable resources to helping beginners. In particular, Adám is crazy knowledgeable about APL and extremely available for answering questions.

Adám is awesome. I'm an avid follower of his criminally underviewed YouTube channel[1].

[1]: https://youtube.com/@abrudz

Re: The APL Challenge

#19

Post by jodrellblank »

upghost wrote: post #17
jodrellblank wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dyalog is a .Net language do you can write classes in APL and export DLLs that you can use from C# or F# from something like ASP.Net web servers.

Very cool! I don't quite know how I would use that to fully embed Dyalog. Very large class..?

What do you mean by "fully embed"? The integration is a 'bridge', the Dyalog engine stays involved. The simplest way is to make a class and method that takes a string and ⍎ evals it as APL code and returns the result, and call that from C#. From there, you could write more and more APL code and make wrapper methods to expose an API of methods that C# can call.

They have a .NET Interface document: https://docs.dyalog.com/latest/dotNET%20Interface%20Guide.pd...

And more general documentation: https://www.dyalog.com/documentation_190.htm including one for classic Windows .NET (instead of .NET Core) and one "APL As A Shared Library" which is about integrating with other systems using C (making a C .DLL) instead of .NET.

Re: The APL Challenge

#20

Post by upghost »

jodrellblank wrote: post #19
upghost wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool! I don't quite know how I would use that to fully embed Dyalog. Very large class..?

What do you mean by "fully embed"? The integration is a 'bridge', the Dyalog engine stays involved. The simplest way is to make a class and method that takes a string and ⍎ evals it as APL code and returns the result, and call that from C#. From there, you could write more and more APL code and make wrapper methods to expose an API of methods that C# can call. They have a .NET Interface document: https://docs.dyalog.…

Ahhh this is fantastic. Exactly what I was looking for. As I said before not that smart, but hopefully a little smarter than I was before. The shared library documents, if I can figure them out, would allow for a libdyalog-clj, which would be extremely exciting. To me, anyway, and maybe like six other people haha.

Thank you, jodrellblank, for being patient with me and for this information.

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