If you're the author, unfortunately I have to say that the blog is not well-written -- misinformed about some of the claims and has a repugnant click-baity title. you're getting the attention and clicks, but probably losing a lot of trust among people. I didn't engage out of choice, but because of a duty to respond to FUD.
> > torch.compile is 2 years old, XLA is 7 years old. Compilers take a few years to mature
> That was one of my major points - I don't think leaning on torch.compile is the best idea. A compiler would inherently place restrictions that you have to work-around.
There are plenty of compilers that place restrictions that you barely notice. gcc, clang, nvcc -- they're fairly flexible, and "dynamic". Adding constraints doesn't mean you have to give up on important flexibility.
> This is not dynamic, nor flexible - and it flies in the face of torch's core philosophies just so they can offer more performance to the big labs using PyTorch. For various reasons, I dislike pandering to the rich guy instead of being an independent, open-source entity.
I think this is an assumption you've made largely without evidence. I'm not entirely sure what your point is. The way torch.compile is measured for success publicly (even in the announcement blogpost and Conference Keynote, link https://pytorch.org/get-started/pytorch-2.0/ ) is by measuring on a bunch of popular PyTorch-based github repos in the wild + popular HuggingFace models + the TIMM vision benchmark. They're curated here https://github.com/pytorch/benchmark . Your claim that its to mainly favor large labs is pretty puzzling.
torch.compile is both dynamic and flexible because: 1. it supports dynamic shapes, 2. it allows incremental compilation (you dont need to compile the parts that you wish to keep in uncompilable python -- probably using random arbitrary python packages, etc.). there is a trade-off between dynamic, flexible and performance, i.e. more dynamic and flexible means we don't have enough information to extract better performance, but that's an acceptable trade-off when you need the flexibility to express your ideas more than you need the speed.
> XLA's GPU support is great, its compatible across different hardware, its optimized and mature. In short, its a great alternative to the often buggy torch.compile stack - if you fix the torch integration.
If you are an XLA maximalist, that's fine. I am not. There isn't evidence to prove out either opinions. PyTorch will never be nicely compatible with XLA until XLA has significant constraints that are incompatible with PyTorch's User Experience model. The PyTorch devs have given clear written-down feedback to the XLA project on what it takes for XLA+PyTorch to get better, and its been a few years and the XLA project prioritizes other things.