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You may find this article I wrote useful background for understanding the capabilities of numerical computing in Swift, including details about a library which

by jph00 7y ago

You may find this article I wrote useful background for understanding the capabilities of numerical computing in Swift, including details about a library which provides features overlapping with the new Swift package: https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/ https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/

Cybiote 7y ago
Thanks, it is a well written article. The only part which tarnishes an otherwise excellent article is the language comparisons portion. Such things are best avoided as they almost always reflect the biases of or where the author has the most experience. As you acknowledge, you were unfair to Julia. Julia has excellent support for general purpose programming. It has support for multiple dispatch, a quite powerful organizational construct rarely found in other languages, for example. Where it might fall short is in the number of general purpose libraries but that shouldn’t matter as much for ML. It certainly isn’t lacking for numeric libraries. For Java, it’s unclear what you mean by JVM issues but with GraalVM and Scala or Kotlin, I fail to identify any major issues. F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime nor does garbage collection limit its expressiveness. It is among the fastest, in the Go/Java/Ocaml/Swift tier, which is next fastest after C/C++/Rust/Fortran. Compare https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/fsharpcore-java.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... to https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/swift.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/.... Setting aside the problems of microbenchmarks and unidiomatic code, they’re both within spitting distance of each other, both wining and losing with no significant margin. Their runtime also recently introduced SIMD and fine-grained memory management support. I'd say practically speaking, Swift's current great weakness is its cross platform support, when compared to Julia, Kotlin/Scala or C#/F#. Swift is an excellent language and it’s great a numeric programming ecosystem is being built for it. There’s no need to justify its existence by misrepresenting or downplaying the capabilities of competing ecosystems. I also saw this occur for why differentiable programming in Swift and not Julia. The more the merrier, I say. Let the various communities collaborate and share ideas in order to better explore the space of possibilities and ideas.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  >F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime how?
  - Cybiote 7y ago
    By bundling. I believe there are couple a options to reduce the resulting package size some. As with all things, it's a matter of priorities when weighing language and deployment options.
- ZeroCool2u 7y ago
  On paper F# seems pretty great. Unfortunately, in practice it was the first and so far the only language I've ever used that I never found myself enjoying. I wrote a simple, but relatively robust toy language interpreter in it, so the time I put in wasn't trivial and I kept thinking it would get better, but no such luck. This is just my anecdotal experience though, I know some companies have been wildly successful with F# as the technical foundation for their entire platform. Jet is a great example of one such company.
  - Cybiote 7y ago
    Certainly, not every language will fit everyone's preferred style of thinking and approach to breaking down problems. This is why I think a diversity in available options is so useful.
- zelly 7y ago
  > JVM issues stop the world GC (my car ran you over because of a random unpredictable pause!) its bytecode is object-oriented impossible at the moment to do CUDA style GPU programming without horrible JNI calls > F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime nor does garbage collection limit its expressiveness F# has two big crippling factors: (1) the .NET at the end of its name and (2) functional programming, which is a huge barrier for 99% of developers (and it's not functional enough for the other 1%). F# is dead in the water--I mean that respectfully. To replace Python for deep learning, you need a language that other people will actually use, not should.

by jph00 7y ago

Cybiote 7y ago

Thanks, it is a well written article. The only part which tarnishes an otherwise excellent article is the language comparisons portion. Such things are best avoided as they almost always reflect the biases of or where the author has the most experience. As you acknowledge, you were unfair to Julia. Julia has excellent support for general purpose programming. It has support for multiple dispatch, a quite powerful organizational construct rarely found in other languages, for example. Where it might fall short is in the number of general purpose libraries but that shouldn’t matter as much for ML. It certainly isn’t lacking for numeric libraries. For Java, it’s unclear what you mean by JVM issues but with GraalVM and Scala or Kotlin, I fail to identify any major issues. F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime nor does garbage collection limit its expressiveness. It is among the fastest, in the Go/Java/Ocaml/Swift tier, which is next fastest after C/C++/Rust/Fortran. Compare https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/fsharpcore-java.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... to https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/swift.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/.... Setting aside the problems of microbenchmarks and unidiomatic code, they’re both within spitting distance of each other, both wining and losing with no significant margin. Their runtime also recently introduced SIMD and fine-grained memory management support. I'd say practically speaking, Swift's current great weakness is its cross platform support, when compared to Julia, Kotlin/Scala or C#/F#. Swift is an excellent language and it’s great a numeric programming ecosystem is being built for it. There’s no need to justify its existence by misrepresenting or downplaying the capabilities of competing ecosystems. I also saw this occur for why differentiable programming in Swift and not Julia. The more the merrier, I say. Let the various communities collaborate and share ideas in order to better explore the space of possibilities and ideas.

throwlaplace 7y ago
>F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime how?
- Cybiote 7y ago
  By bundling. I believe there are couple a options to reduce the resulting package size some. As with all things, it's a matter of priorities when weighing language and deployment options.
ZeroCool2u 7y ago
On paper F# seems pretty great. Unfortunately, in practice it was the first and so far the only language I've ever used that I never found myself enjoying. I wrote a simple, but relatively robust toy language interpreter in it, so the time I put in wasn't trivial and I kept thinking it would get better, but no such luck. This is just my anecdotal experience though, I know some companies have been wildly successful with F# as the technical foundation for their entire platform. Jet is a great example of one such company.
- Cybiote 7y ago
  Certainly, not every language will fit everyone's preferred style of thinking and approach to breaking down problems. This is why I think a diversity in available options is so useful.
zelly 7y ago
> JVM issues stop the world GC (my car ran you over because of a random unpredictable pause!) its bytecode is object-oriented impossible at the moment to do CUDA style GPU programming without horrible JNI calls > F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime nor does garbage collection limit its expressiveness F# has two big crippling factors: (1) the .NET at the end of its name and (2) functional programming, which is a huge barrier for 99% of developers (and it's not functional enough for the other 1%). F# is dead in the water--I mean that respectfully. To replace Python for deep learning, you need a language that other people will actually use, not should.