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Why Swift for TensorFlow?

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Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#41

Post by make3 »

coder543 wrote: post #21
criddell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ru…

As I pointed out in two lengthy comments on day one[1][2], that reasoning is nonsense. If Chris wants to use the language he created in this new endeavor for machine learning simply because he made it , that's totally fine and completely his prerogative, but he should just say so, rather than trying (and failing) to convince people that other languages aren't better suited for this task. From my point of view, a weak…

it's fairly well accepted that rust has a high learning curve and their targeted users are not software engineers, so I wouldn't say their point is nonsense

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#42

Post by make3 »

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.

how can you not mention Python when it's currently what is used 99% of the time, the other 1% being R

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#43

Post by eschaton »

skwb wrote: post #26

Forgive me for my ignorance, but does swift have any good plotting and interactive "notebook" ability? Specifically the ability to plot images such as matplotlib. I ask this because the number 1 reason my deep learning research group chose python was because of the extensive and interactive scientific plotting ability that's built into python jupyter notebooks. While our volume of analysis isn't on the scale of say a…

Interactive plotting and “notebook” capability isn’t a property of a language so it’s fallacious to ask if Swift has it. (Or Python, or Julia, or Wolfram, etc.)

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#44

Post by m0zg »

rudedogg wrote: post #40
m0zg wrote: post #7

Is there a "standard" way of running Swift on Ubuntu LTS nowadays? A while back I looked into it, and ran into some hokey and unsatisfying solutions. I used Swift on iOS, and I like it a lot, but if they care about adoption, someone needs to reduce friction of getting up and running to approximately zero. A snap package a-la Go or per-user script based installation a-la Rust would be quite OK, as long as it's just on…

It looks pretty straightforward, see the Linux section of https://swift.org/download/#using-downloads

Yeah, going through two screenfuls of text every time I want to upgrade is not "straightforward".

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#45

Post by rudedogg »

skwb wrote: post #27
sjwright wrote: post #6

I have no idea what TensorFlow is (other than the basics) but I enjoyed reading that entire document because it did such a wonderful job of explaining a complex and potentially contentious decision. It’s fascinating to see Swift feature so strongly in a pragmatic analysis that doesn’t explicitly favour Apple platform interop.

I am a bit ignorant on the topic, but is swift available for Windows/Ubuntu? Most of the deep learning scientists I know and work with use either of the two setups. I know there technically exists CUDA GPU support for Apple, but I have frankly never even attempted to mess with it.

Ubuntu is supported (see https://swift.org/download/), but Windows is pretty early I think.

See https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/Windows.md and https://forums.swift.org/t/windows-nightlies/19174 for more info.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#46

Post by microcolonel »

3jckd wrote: post #29

It's interesting how it's going to play out. On one hand side, Swift is a pleasant language to work with (despite its infancy). But on the other, having a Tensorflow API doesn't suddenly give it a bunch of libraries for statistics, comp. vision, modeling, visualisation, etc. that Python/R/Julia cough MATLAB cough have. Nowadays, it's difficult enough to convince people to drop e.g. MATLAB for R or Python for Julia (l…

I feel like GraalVM has a chance to solve some of this at least. I wonder if anyone will make an Octave GraalVM frontend, they already have one for R.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#47

Post by ychen306 »

3jckd wrote: post #29

It's interesting how it's going to play out. On one hand side, Swift is a pleasant language to work with (despite its infancy). But on the other, having a Tensorflow API doesn't suddenly give it a bunch of libraries for statistics, comp. vision, modeling, visualisation, etc. that Python/R/Julia cough MATLAB cough have. Nowadays, it's difficult enough to convince people to drop e.g. MATLAB for R or Python for Julia (l…

I will say this in the risk of talking out of my ass as I have no experience in either language :). Having a statically typed language greatly simplifies the tooling because static analysis is much easier; graph program extraction involves one such analysis. When you have to deploy the trained model in production one would hope not to use Python or Julia.

I'd like to add that, with my limited experience in prototyping some of my ML models, having a static checker to check that your tensors have the right shape is much better than having to run your code.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#48

Post by dnautics »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
coder543 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I pointed out in two lengthy comments on day one[1][2], that reasoning is nonsense. If Chris wants to use the language he created in this new endeavor for machine learning simply because he made it , that's totally fine and completely his prerogative, but he should just say so, rather than trying (and failing) to convince people that other languages aren't better suited for this task. From my point of view, a weak…

I agree with you regarding lack of Windows support, however I would rather see Julia as a better alternative than Rust, given the language ergonomics.

More to the point static typing is just not that important for data scientists. Arguably it's not that important for backends devs either (e.g. lisp, erlang).

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#50

Post by phillipcarter »

dnautics wrote: post #48
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you regarding lack of Windows support, however I would rather see Julia as a better alternative than Rust, given the language ergonomics.

More to the point static typing is just not that important for data scientists. Arguably it's not that important for backends devs either (e.g. lisp, erlang).

Should be prefaced with, "I think".

Having done user research on this by speaking to data scientists, I can say that static typing is desired by a nonzero number of who practice what we would consider to be data science and machine learning. Much like how TypeScript is seen as a revelation to hordes of JavaScript programmers who have never used static types before, the ability to get some level of correctness verification at design-time matters.

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