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Dunno, almost all of the people I know anywhere in the ML space are on the C and Rust end of the spectrum. Lack of types, lack of static analysis, lack of ...
by DiabloD3 1y ago
Dunno, almost all of the people I know anywhere in the ML space are on the C and Rust end of the spectrum.
Lack of types, lack of static analysis, lack of ... well, lack of everything Python doesn't provide and fights users on costs too much developer time. It is a net negative to continue pouring time and money into anything Python-based.
The sole exclusion I've seen to my social circle is those working at companies that don't directly do ML, but provide drivers/hardware/supporting software to ML people in academia, and have to try to fix their cursed shit for them.
Also, fwiw, there is no reason why Triton is Python. I dislike Triton for a lot of reasons, but its just a matmul kernel DSL, there is nothing inherent in it that has to be, or benefits from, being Python.... it takes DSL in, outputs shader text out, then has the vendor's API run it (ie, CUDA, ROCm, etc). It, too, would benefit from becoming Rust.
- nkozyra 1y ago> Dunno, almost all of the people I know anywhere in the ML space are on the C and Rust end of the spectrum. I wish this were broadly true. But there's too much legacy Python sunk cost for most people though. Just so much inertia behind Python for people to abandon it and try to rebuild an extensive history of ML tooling. I think ML will fade away from Python eventually but right now it's still everywhere.
- DiabloD3 1y agoA lot of what I see in ML is all focused around Triton, which is why I mentioned it. If someone wrote a Triton impl that is all Rust instead, that would do a _lot_ of the heavy lifting on switching... most of their hard code is in Triton DSL, not in Python, the Python is all boring code that calls Triton funcs. That changes the argument on cost for a lot of people, but sadly not all.
- mountainriver 1y agoI love Rust and C, I write quite a bit of both. I am an ML engineer by trade. To say most ML people are using Rust and C couldn’t be further from the truth
- Narishma 1y agoThey said most people they knew, not most people.
- mountainriver 1y agoIt was obviously implied
- airza 1y agoOkay. Humor me. I want to write a transformer-based classifier for a project. I am accustomed to the pytorch and tensorflow libraries. What is the equivalent using C?
- adastra22 1y agoYou do know that tensorflow was written in C++ and the Python API bolted on top?
- wolvesechoes 1y agoIt could be written in mix of Cobol and APL. No one cares. People saying "oh those Python libraries are just C/C++ libraries with Python API, every language can have them" have one problem - no other language has them (with such extensive documentation, tutorials etc.)
- adastra22 1y agoTensorflow has extensive documentation of its C++ interface, as that is the primary interface for the library (the Python API is a wrapper on top).
- wolvesechoes 1y agoI hoped it was quite obvious that by "other languages" I meant "other than Python and C/C++ in which they are written". At least sibling actually mentioned Java.
- adastra22 1y agoScroll up this thread and the other poster was asking if you can use pytorch and tensorflow from C. Both are C++ libraries, so accessing them from C/C++ is pretty trivial and has first-class support.
- 1y ago
- wolvesechoes 1y ago> It, too, would benefit from becoming Rust. Yet it was created for Python. Someone took that effort and did it. No one took that effort in Rust. End of the story of crab's superiority. Python community is constantly creating new, great, highly usable packages that become de facto industry standards, and maintain old ones for years, creating tutorials, trainings and docs. Commercial vendors ship Python APIs to their proprietary solutions. Whereas Rust community is going through forums and social media telling them that they should use Rust instead, or that they "cheated" because those libraries are really C/C++ libraries (and BTW those should be done in Rust as well, because safety).