4 ms·
Swift for TensorFlow was a nice idea on paper, but you need more than ideas to push a project forward. You need people who actually want to use your product. F
by belval 6y ago
Swift for TensorFlow was a nice idea on paper, but you need more than ideas to push a project forward. You need people who actually want to use your product.
For all the comments on HN about how great Swift was, there were hundreds if not thousands of ML engineer and research scientist who did not know it existed and frankly did not really care about it either.
Swift for Tensorflow was not addressing the issues of ML in productions and felt like "Just another framework" but with the added handicap of needing its users to learn an entirely new language which is not something most scientists want to do. One might argue that engineering might be more interested, but in a lot of cases the science team will push the models and then the engineering team will put them in production, leaving very little room to migrate from TF/Pytorch to Swift for TF.
- SatvikBeri 6y agoIt's interesting to compare Swift to Julia here – Julia had a base of people who absolutely loved it from the 0.2 days, and has managed to draw many users from Python/Matlab/R. There are many reasons for that, but overall Julia had something that really appealed to scientists: syntax they liked + competitive-with-C performance. In contrast, S4TF's target audience seems to have been Swift developers, and they didn't really appeal to the data science crowd.
- belval 6y agoPrecisely, S4TF felt like a startup product with no market research. It really felt like the only reason Swift was chosen was because the main dev created it.
- Traster 6y agoWe see this all the time right, the next big ML company is going to come from some scrappy startup with a precise focus on what to do (either because they're geniuses or because they're just the lucky idiot amongst 10,000 ML startups), not from some behemoth that decides "we'll eat that for breakfast". Swift4ML suffers from the fact that Swift exists. To make S4ML work you need to abandon atleast some of the things that makes Swift Swift.