Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Like others here, at work we switched over from TensorFlow to PyTorch when 1.0 was released, both for R&D and production. Our productivity and happiness with PyTorch are noticeably, significantly better.

Back when we were using TensorFlow, whenever we wanted to try something new, sooner or later we would find ourselves wrestling with its computational graph abstraction, which is non-intuitive, especially for models with more complex control flow.

That said, we are keeping an eye on Swift + MLIR + TensorFlow. We think it could unseat PyTorch for R&D and eventually, production, due to (a) the promise of automatic creation of high-performance GPU/TPU kernels without hassle, (b) Swift's easy learning curve, and (c) Swift's fast performance and type safety. Jeremy Howard has a good post about this: https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/

I've read a reasonable amount about this and listened to a bit of the podcasts they've done.

It feels a bit too early to tell. I don't believe many researchers will switch to Swift though.

Yeah, I'm not convinced at all. It's the same reason why Julia hasn't replaced Python for scientific computing either. There is wayyy too much infrastructure in Python for datascience / machine-learning to just up and switch to Swift. I get that he's excited about a new challenge, but I don't think it's going to be great for the Python library when Jeremey switches over to Swift.

As it is the API for FastAI is constantly changing and has hardly ever felt particularly stable. I don't see it ending up becoming this complete, stable, polished framework if they keep switching focus. I don't care one way or the other as I don't personally use it because it is way too complex to extend it to do anything simple if you just have your own networks and Dataset class that you want to plug into their infrastructure. Being familiar with Pytorch and Python, I've always found it much easier to just work with those 2 rather than trying to bend the fastai library to do things that don't fit perfectly into the applications they designed for.

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