How does this compare to Jax? https://github.com/google/jax Why do this in the language instead of a library?
Moreover, a statically typed language like Swift is a much better starting point for this kind of effort than Python. Array shapes and dimensions are already a type system - you might as well go the whole distance and get all the other safety, readability, and efficiency benefits!
PS shout out for named array axes as the future of array-based (and hence differentiable) programming... see http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/NamedTensor for a good rationale
The fact that you can jit compile and gain the benefits of "doing this within the compiler" is one of its main selling points.
should this be done as a special case in the compiler
or
shouldn’t this be a more general meta programming based feature
with those in favor of meta-programming also bringing up the potential complexity/speed loss added to the compiler for this feature
the problem for swift is, there hasn’t been a coherent meta-programming story (something like a meta-programming mega proposal) so it seems hard to push for that instead right now....