4 ms·

Hmm, I would've expected them to double down on differentiation within Julia (via Zygote etc)

eigenspace 5y ago
MIT is a big place, there's lots of people there who don't use julia, and I don't think there's any structures in place to stop MIT people from making new languages (nor should there be).
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > I don't think there's any structures in place to stop MIT people from making new languages (nor should there be). And just reminding people this is one of the very few cases when it is ok to create a new language.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Yeah, based on the title and where it's from I half expected it to be some kind of DSL based on Julia. Instead it's based on Coq which gives them formal verification capability.
simeonschaub 5y ago
It reads to me like ATL is actually more of a tensor compiler than a general-purpose language. In fact, I'd actually be curious if we could lower (subsets of) Julia to ATL, let it optimize the tensor expressions and transpile everything back into Julia/LLVM IR for further optimizations. In Julia, there is already Tullio.jl [1], which is basically a front end for tensor expressions, which can target both CPUs and GPUs with AD support and automatically parallelizes the computation. It doesn't really optimize the generated code much right now though, so something like this could be interesting. [1] https://github.com/mcabbott/Tullio.jl https://github.com/mcabbott/Tullio.jl
tgflynn 5y ago
Basing it on Julia would make sense for certain reasons, basing it on Coq would make sense for different reasons but basing it on Python, as appears to be the case from the only code sample I've seen, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  According to the paper it is based on Coq. Perhaps there's a python interface to that which kind of makes sense because a lot more people have experience with Python than with Coq and giving them some kind of bridge so they could use Python as a frontend would help with adoption.

MIT is a big place, there's lots of people there who don't use julia, and I don't think there's any structures in place to stop MIT people from making new languages (nor should there be).

rbanffy 5y ago
> I don't think there's any structures in place to stop MIT people from making new languages (nor should there be). And just reminding people this is one of the very few cases when it is ok to create a new language.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

Yeah, based on the title and where it's from I half expected it to be some kind of DSL based on Julia. Instead it's based on Coq which gives them formal verification capability.

simeonschaub 5y ago

It reads to me like ATL is actually more of a tensor compiler than a general-purpose language. In fact, I'd actually be curious if we could lower (subsets of) Julia to ATL, let it optimize the tensor expressions and transpile everything back into Julia/LLVM IR for further optimizations. In Julia, there is already Tullio.jl [1], which is basically a front end for tensor expressions, which can target both CPUs and GPUs with AD support and automatically parallelizes the computation. It doesn't really optimize the generated code much right now though, so something like this could be interesting. [1] https://github.com/mcabbott/Tullio.jl https://github.com/mcabbott/Tullio.jl

tgflynn 5y ago

Basing it on Julia would make sense for certain reasons, basing it on Coq would make sense for different reasons but basing it on Python, as appears to be the case from the only code sample I've seen, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
According to the paper it is based on Coq. Perhaps there's a python interface to that which kind of makes sense because a lot more people have experience with Python than with Coq and giving them some kind of bridge so they could use Python as a frontend would help with adoption.