Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#1

Post by nnd » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

Why Swift for TensorFlow?
github.com

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#2

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#3

Post by adamnemecek » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

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.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#4

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#5

Post by elpakal » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

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 admirable commitment. Onward!

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#6

Post by sjwright » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 8:54 PM UTC

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.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#7

Post by m0zg » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

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 one, easy to discover command.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#8

Post by igotsideas » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

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 Swift 4 on my machine.

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#9

Post by gthippo » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

Swift is also now supported in Colab (Google-hosted Jupyter notebooks) and there's a nice tutorial on some of the features of Swift for Tensorflow at https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/swift-tu...

Re: Why Swift for TensorFlow?

#10

Post by gthippo » Sun, Feb 10, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

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…

You might be interested in checking out Swift on Google Colab (e.g., https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/swift-tu...)