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by moelf 656 days ago
what is so buggy, Julia the language or the deep learning libraries in Julia? in either case it would be good to have some examples.
3 comments

julia the language is really good. but a lot of core infrastructure julia libraries are maintained by some overworked grad student.

sometimes that grad student is a brilliantly productive programmer + the libraries reach escape velocity and build a community, and then you get areas where Julia is state of the art like in differential equation solving, or generally other areas of "classical" scientific computing.

in other cases the grad student is merely a very good programmer, and they just sort of float along being "almost but not quite there" for a long time, maybe abandoned depending on the maintainer's career path.

the latter case is pretty common in the machine learning ecosystem. a lot of people get excited about using a fast language for ML, see that Julia can do what they want in a really cool way, and then run into some breaking problem or missing feature ("will be fixed eventually") after investing some time in a project.

This is an old-ish article about Julia, but from what I can tell the core issues with autograd were never fixed:

https://kidger.site/thoughts/jax-vs-julia/

the deep learning libraries. can't figure out why one of my gradient didn't work so i switch implementation to pytorch and it worked perfectly fine.