3 ms·

Fortran! If you don't mind me asking, why Fortran? I know it underpins a lot of time-tested scientific code, often wrapped by libraries like PyTorch and Numpy,

• andy99 3y ago
  Tdlr, Fortran is low level-ish, compiled, but otherwise almost identical to numpy syntax wise. It supports all the common array and matrix operations and it doesn't need memory and pointer management the way C does. But it still compiles down to something very fast, you can link in BLAS and GPU libraries, supports easy parallelism... When I compare with e.g. Karpathy's llama2.c, I think Fortran is easy to work with implementing basic transformer inference because of how it handles arrays. The downside is that while there are efforts to modernize it, I find it more cumbersome for non-numerical stuff, particularly strings. But I think for the actual linear algebra implementation, it can't be beat. I should add, I know it's a bit of an uphill battle, I expect fewer people will use code that I write in Fortran vs basically anything else. But I'm hoping to pull some people in and get a critical mass of interest because I think it has a lot of promise. That's actually one of the reasons I wanted to get a Mamba implementation quickly (though now that there's a basic python one I think I'll have lost some potential users to it :)
  • cs702 3y ago
    Thanks for the thoughtful response. Unfortunately, I too think it will be a bit of an uphill battle for you. If you haven't already, take a look at Mojo and Julia. Both offer many of the benefits of Fortran, but unlike it, they are seeing growing adoption.
    • andy99 3y ago
      An uphill battle is fine
      • gnaritas99 3y ago
        [dead]
• cztomsik 3y ago
  I only heard good things about fortran :)