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Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

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Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#41

Post by eigenspace »

whimsicalism wrote: post #34
dynamite-ready wrote: post #32

Does anyone else think that C++ makes more sense for ML work than Python? I'd been thinking so for years. Both for deployment/performance and data wrangling purposes.

In general, I think languages with static typing are preferable. C++ seems ideal for me right now because it is the only other language with a somewhat mature stack (perhaps Julia as well, but I haven't played too much around with that).

Julia is dynamically typed FYI. However, I find that usually when people say they want a statically typed language, they don't actually want static typing (which is just a restriction of language semantics), but instead they want a language with a powerful type system that does work for them.

In this case, julia absolutely is worth checking out. It does static analysis on it's intermediate representation to automatically identify and isolate statically inferrable regions of programs and then stitches them together if it ever encounters any dynamism.

Julia's type system is extremely powerful and expressive and can do a lot of things that are incredibly difficult in fully static languages precisely because it does allow dynamism.

Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#42

Post by jcelerier »

cozzyd wrote: post #20
angry_octet wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I could see the construction, I just can't think why they wouldn't anticipate the problems it could cause down the track.

Wait until people accidentally an ML model?

the whole model !

Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#43

Post by codebolt »

dynamite-ready wrote: post #32

Does anyone else think that C++ makes more sense for ML work than Python? I'd been thinking so for years. Both for deployment/performance and data wrangling purposes.

Absolutely. In 2010 I used FANN for my Msc thesis research, and found it pretty easy to make my own little training sim for stock price data on top of it. Haven't done any ML work since, but I always scratched my head over how Python became the most popular language for this domain.

Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#44

Post by angry_octet »

angry_octet wrote: post #2

The name has unfortunate verbal similarities with a well known sex toy, especially when different accents are considered. I am actually astounded they went ahead with this name.

Well this observation has produced a furious negative reaction, which I suspect is of both puritanical and chauvinist origin.

Perhaps because I can't see very well I had uncertainty when reading the article title. But unless you're quite innocent (i.e. not a user of the internet) I don't see how you could avoid knowing about such devices. Knowing many programmers, I also know that they span the full spectrum from Bible-studies to BDSM (though that might be a horseshoe), and many are prone to juvenile humour which can become sexually toned. So I know that someone will use it in this context. When you become a manager you choose to avoid creating such problems. Some of you probably see this tone policing -- you are correct, suck it up.

For those who don't understand what Hamming distance is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance

Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#45

Post by secondcoming »

angry_octet wrote: post #44
angry_octet wrote: post #2

The name has unfortunate verbal similarities with a well known sex toy, especially when different accents are considered. I am actually astounded they went ahead with this name.

Well this observation has produced a furious negative reaction, which I suspect is of both puritanical and chauvinist origin. Perhaps because I can't see very well I had uncertainty when reading the article title. But unless you're quite innocent (i.e. not a user of the internet) I don't see how you could avoid knowing about such devices. Knowing many programmers, I also know that they span the full spectrum from Bib…

You accidentally the whole thing

Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#46

Post by teruakohatu »

dynamite-ready wrote: post #32

Does anyone else think that C++ makes more sense for ML work than Python? I'd been thinking so for years. Both for deployment/performance and data wrangling purposes.

Take a look at Julia's Flux.jl. It has a really nice API and is quite intuitive to use at a low level, and has higher level components as well.

Julia has a fast maturing data wrangling super-project (Queryverse).

Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#47

Post by [deleted] »

whimsicalism wrote: post #23
dwrodri wrote: post #21

This seems really cool, but I don't get why they would pour work into this while simultaneously building a C++ front-end for PyTorch[1]. Per the blog post, both frameworks have the goal of empowering ML researchers to iterate on ML models in such a way that it becomes easier to reason about performance than it would be talking to a bunch of dynamically linked object files behind an interpreter. Facebook is a huge com…

Flashlight is much lower level and gives more fine-grained performance control. For instance, I don't think there is really any way to do real-time speech recognition that is fast with PyTorch because of how it is architected. From my understanding, Tensor Comprehensions and Halide are both very tentative research projects. > not having it's direction beholden to the whims of Alphabet (see: Swift for Tensorflow). I d…

[deleted]

Re: Flashlight: Fast and flexible machine learning in C++

#50

Post by julienb_sea »

dwrodri wrote: post #21

This seems really cool, but I don't get why they would pour work into this while simultaneously building a C++ front-end for PyTorch[1]. Per the blog post, both frameworks have the goal of empowering ML researchers to iterate on ML models in such a way that it becomes easier to reason about performance than it would be talking to a bunch of dynamically linked object files behind an interpreter. Facebook is a huge com…

The documentation for flashlight focuses heavily on low level customizability and rapid rebuilding. My suspicion is that pytorch is fundamentally not designed around rapid iteration of the core model code. Flashlight targets a different use case.

As far as Facebook engineering resources are concerned, I believe facebook takes the approach that supporting open source high visibility projects is itself a recruiting draw for pulling talented engineers into their umbrella.

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