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Why not Swift? (I think I know the answer). Concurrency in Swift is not yet a solved problem, but libdispatch is quite workable (although not "elegant, out of

Why not Swift? (I think I know the answer). Concurrency in Swift is not yet a solved problem, but libdispatch is quite workable (although not "elegant, out of the box" per the article). With the work being done in Swift for TensorFlow [0], I'd imagine in a year or two both the infrastructure and the ML portions of a product like Cortex could be written in a single language. [0] - https://www.tensorflow.org/swift https://www.tensorflow.org/swift

calebkaiser 7y ago
Swift is an interesting choice, one we haven't explored in depth. Out of curiosity, have you done any work with Swift for Tensorflow/what has your experience been?
- Jerry2 7y ago
  Not him but the company I work for has moved most of our ML pipelines away from Python and over to Swift. We started the move after Google announced support for Swift for TF. Before the move over to Swift, we were rewriting a lot of the data paths in C++ but were generally unhappy with the state of TF for C++ libraries. The move to Swift hasn't been without hiccups, however, but the community has been extremely helpful and it was worth it overall. State of Swift for TF libraries today is quite good. We looked at Go early on but quickly dismissed it because with the move from Python to Go, it didn't seem like we were getting enough benefits to warrant the amount of work that would be required.
pjmlp 7y ago
Until Swift stops requiring stuff like import Glibc for basic IO and actually supports Windows, I would consider it an Apple only language.
threeseed 7y ago
Tensorflow which is for Deep Learning is a very tiny part of the overall ML requirements. To do large scale data preparation and engineering which necessitates clustering you would need to reinvent Spark. And then how about for the more common algorithms like boosted trees etc. Those algorithms are provided by Apple for iOS/MacOS but not sure if they exist for everyone else.

calebkaiser 7y ago

Swift is an interesting choice, one we haven't explored in depth. Out of curiosity, have you done any work with Swift for Tensorflow/what has your experience been?

Jerry2 7y ago
Not him but the company I work for has moved most of our ML pipelines away from Python and over to Swift. We started the move after Google announced support for Swift for TF. Before the move over to Swift, we were rewriting a lot of the data paths in C++ but were generally unhappy with the state of TF for C++ libraries. The move to Swift hasn't been without hiccups, however, but the community has been extremely helpful and it was worth it overall. State of Swift for TF libraries today is quite good. We looked at Go early on but quickly dismissed it because with the move from Python to Go, it didn't seem like we were getting enough benefits to warrant the amount of work that would be required.

pjmlp 7y ago

Until Swift stops requiring stuff like import Glibc for basic IO and actually supports Windows, I would consider it an Apple only language.

threeseed 7y ago

Tensorflow which is for Deep Learning is a very tiny part of the overall ML requirements. To do large scale data preparation and engineering which necessitates clustering you would need to reinvent Spark. And then how about for the more common algorithms like boosted trees etc. Those algorithms are provided by Apple for iOS/MacOS but not sure if they exist for everyone else.