Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wokwokwok 2502 days ago
> They don't care about the kind of safety it brings, they don't care about improving performance in a component that's idle 99% of the time.

https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/:

> Because Swift for TensorFlow is the first serious effort I’ve seen to incorporate differentiable programming deep in to the heart of a widely used language that is designed from the ground up for performance.

> But Python is not designed to be fast, and it is not designed to be safe. Instead, it is designed to be easy, and flexible. To work around the performance problems of using “pure Python” code, we instead have to use libraries written in other languages (generally C and C++), like numpy, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, which provide Python wrappers. To work around the problem of a lack of type safety, recent versions of Python have added type annotations that optionally allow the programmer to specify the types used in a program. However, Python’s type system is not capable of expressing many types and type relationships, does not do any automated typing, and can not reliably check all types at compile time. Therefore, using types in Python requires a lot of extra code, but falls far short of the level of type safety that other languages can provide.

ie. My point: OP's point is categorically false.

...not that swift is tedious. I <3 swift.
1 comments
kuzehanka 2502 days ago
...But fast.ai is a Python library. Partially written in swift.

Validating the original point that nothing will replace python for DL applications any time soon but middleware will continue to be implemented in c++/rust/swift/whatever you fancy.

S4TF isn't the first and certainly not the last end to end non-python DL stack. It might be worth highlighting as an example if it ever reaches mindshare above the noise floor amongst those stacks.

link
wokwokwok 2502 days ago
> Our hope is that we’ll be able to use Swift to write every layer of the deep learning stack, from the highest level network abstractions all the way down to the lowest level RNN cell implementation. There would be many benefits to doing this...

Well, the tldr: you’re wrong.

The more approachable reading: python isn’t going anywhere, but people are looking at other things for more than just low level implementations with a python wrapper.

...it’s early days yet, who knows where things will go... but maybe do a bit more reading and have an open mind?

There’s more to life than python.

link