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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

This is why I think Swift is a much better choice to replace or at least compliment Python than Rust. It has a modern, powerful type system and all the quality of life advantages which come with it, but it manages this with a lot more usability than Rust.

A well written swift framework almost becomes a DSL for the problem domain, which is a great property for a data science tool to have.

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Swift is not fun on non-Mac platforms. It feels a lot like Google's Dart in terms of how it was positioned and advocated.

Modern Rust isn't difficult to use. This is becoming a really tired meme from detractors. The compiler is incredibly helpful, non-lexical lifetimes are a thing, and unless you're doing a lot of sharing and parallelism, you can avoid many borrow checker problems until you learn RAII.

It's a fair criticism of Swift that it is not well supported across platforms. The story is getting better, but it is still miles behind Rust in this regard. I am a huge fan of Swift as a language, but I am very critical of the tooling.

> Modern Rust isn't difficult to use. This is becoming a really tired meme from detractors.

I beg to differ. I've been programming professionally for over a decade, and I have shipped projects in a variety of languages, and I can safely say that Rust has a steeper learning curve and requires more cognitive overhead to use than many other languages. I find it relatively nice to work with rust in spite of this because the tooling is so great, but it's undeniable that Rust has made tradeoffs which sacrifice ease of use in favor of safety and performance.

The tooling for Swift 4 TF is not anywhere near satisfactory. I can't even seem to get it on my computer without installing XCode (and that's on an apple computer)

I should be able to pull a docker image and have s4tf immediately at my fingertips

Seems the Fast.ai forums have got you covered here. https://forums.fast.ai/t/swift-for-tensorflow-using-gpu-with... describes how to do it, while not completely 'at my fingertips' it's pretty close. and Googles repo at https://github.com/google/swift-jupyter has a clean setup, too.

I've come across that first link before, but remember I had some issues.

The two problems are a. I don't have a GPU locally b. I would rather have a compiler than just a REPL/jupyter

Not local, but you can start using S4TF immediately via Google Colab.

https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/swift/bl...

if I’m going to be developing, I need a compiler, not a REPL or a notebook. Haven’t managed to find that

The Dockerfile in the swift-jupyter repo is a superset of what you need. You could remove the lines dealing with jupyter and you'd be left with a Docker container with the s4tf compiler.

https://github.com/google/swift-jupyter/blob/master/docker/D...

Thank you - I will give that a try!

The "Rust is difficult" criticism isn't getting tired, but it must be getting tiresome for the Rust community because they don't have a good answer to it.

The top level comment from an early adopter in the last Rust release thread on HN was complaining about the tedious complexity.

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