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Has anyone looked at Julia? It’s claim is C like performance with the ease of use of a language like python.

• Datenstrom 6y ago
  Yes, I have done non-trivial implementations of a number of SoTA models in Julia. The framework I've used is Flux[1] which I love for it's simplicity, it is very much like the DarkNet[2] framework in that regard which is refreshing after using TensorFlow. PyTorch is much better about not having unnecessary complexity and a sensible API but Flux is certainly better. The ability for Julia to compile directly to PTX assembly[3][4] means that you can even write the GPU kernels in Julia and eliminate the C/C++ CUDA code. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to be done to make it as reliably fast and easy as TensorFlow/PyTorch so I don't think it is usable for production yet. I hope it will be production ready soon but it will likely take some time to highly tune the compute stacks. They are already working on AMD GPU support with AMDGPU.jl[5] and with the latest NVIDIA GPU release which has IMHO purposefully decreased performance (onboard RAM, power) for scientific compute application I would love to be able to develop on my AMD GPU workstation and deploy on whatever infrastructure easily in the same language. I do have some gripes with Julia but the biggest of them are mostly cosmetic. [1]: https://fluxml.ai/ https://fluxml.ai/ [2]: https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet [3]: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpu-computing-julia-programming-language/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpu-computing-julia-progra... [4]: http://blog.maleadt.net/2015/01/15/julia-cuda/ http://blog.maleadt.net/2015/01/15/julia-cuda/ [5]: https://github.com/JuliaGPU/AMDGPU.jl https://github.com/JuliaGPU/AMDGPU.jl