[sjwright]

I have no idea what TensorFlow is (other than the basics) but I enjoyed reading that entire document because it did such a wonderful job of explaining a complex and potentially contentious decision. It’s fascinating to see Swift feature so strongly in a pragmatic analysis that doesn’t explicitly favour Apple platform interop.

[skwb]

I am a bit ignorant on the topic, but is swift available for Windows/Ubuntu? Most of the deep learning scientists I know and work with use either of the two setups. I know there technically exists CUDA GPU support for Apple, but I have frankly never even attempted to mess with it.

[rudedogg]

Ubuntu is supported (see https://swift.org/download/), but Windows is pretty early I think.

See https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/Windows.md and https://forums.swift.org/t/windows-nightlies/19174 for more info.

[pjmlp]

Ubuntu is "supported". The compiler might be available, but there are hardly many libraries available that would compile outside Apple platforms.

[skohan]

That's no longer true. The Foundation framework is basically complete on Linux, and the vast majority 3rd party libraries which are not iOS specific will work on Ubuntu. Even many of Apple's own libraries (i.e. SwiftNIO, a low-level, high performance networking library for things like implementing web-servers) are cross-platform.

[pjmlp]

Last time I checked, the "the vast majority 3rd party libraries which are not iOS specific" was actually quite tiny.

[skohan]

You'd be surprised. There are a few reasonably well developed server-side frameworks, some of which are already used in production various places.

Also a lot of the libraries which are mostly used in iOS don't have any dependancies on the iOS platform: for instance promise or event emitter implementations etc.

IBM is actually supporting a number of open-source swift projects as well: https://github.com/IBM-Swift.

Between that and painless interop with C/C++, Swift does not feel under-supported on Linux in the least.