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Comment by nochance | Hacker News Reader

Not clear with MLIR, since it seems to have some traction beyond S4TF.

But yes, I think S4TF has had zero interest among people actually doing ML and is probably dead. It might take Google a while to actually kill it off, though.

From conversations I’ve had with people doing ML, if they know about S4TF at all they actively dislike certain aspects (for example that it’s based on a statically typed language), or are dismissive of others (like support for differentiation, which is a neat parlor trick but saves a tiny bit of effort).

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Not "zero" IMO. I, for one, was excited about its potential, I was just waiting for it to mature (wisely in retrospect). Python is really bursting at the seams for ML/DL at this point and the ecosystem is in need of a proper compiled language for implementing deep learning systems. This language must be easier on the newcomers than C++.

Imagine a future where you could tell if your shit's broken by recompiling it, and your "deployment" would be just putting some RPC in front of your existing code.

Most people I know that understand s4tf well (including me) are excited about it. Chris Lattner and I co-taught two video lessons on it - have a look at those and see what you think: https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=13 .

I think you might have misread. I'm excited about it, it just wasn't mature enough for anything client-facing for me.

I didn't misread - I was agreeing with you! :) And disagreeing with the person you were responding to.

Would you be open to doing a Fast.ai initiative in Julia? If so, what would that take?

I would be delighted. I've even spoken to the Julia core team about it. Hopefully one day they'll make that happen! (Just like we developed SwiftAI thanks to support from Chris Lattner and the s4tf team).

How can I try those lessons on Windows?

Probably easiest is to use Colab, which supports Swift directly. Otherwise, use one of the approaches shown on the course site: https://course.fast.ai/

(Most data scientists on Windows, including me, use SSH to connect to a GPU server running Linux for training models.)

So not an option against the competition that has no issues supporting Windows as first class citizen.

Windows needs to die though. The sooner it dies, the sooner we can all just assume that everything has bash and a bunch of excellent compilers installed.

There plenty of OS that aren't POSIX clones, Windows is not alone.

Anyone that cares about bash on Windows can install mingw or WSL, preferably WSL2.

Tablets don't have CLIs by default.

Even if UNIX clones ruled the world, chsh is a thing.

Hey Jeremy, I'm a really big fan. I got really interested in Swift based on your initial blogpost on it, and managed to get the company I work at to invest a bit in researching how suitable it could be for real time ML on video.

If it's not too forward, do you know at the moment if FastAI will continue to invest in Swift? I know development was a bit stalled due to the work needed for FastAI 2.0, but I was wandering if it'll resume, or if Richard Wei and Chris Lattner leaving changes anything?

Cheers and thanks for FastAI!

PD: Was working a bit on SwiftCV, added the videoio and highgui modules. Was wondering if I should PR it to fastai's or vvmnnnkv's version of the repo?

I was also pretty excited when I heard that they were baking autodiff into the language but unfortunately Swift has very little traction outside of mobile development, which makes it a hard sell.

I think a compiled subset of python is the best way to make that happen. All of the JITs (Numba, PyTorch, Jax, etc) already handle a decent portion of the language, so it should be doable.

No compile time type / function signature checking - no deal.

That language is Julia, plus there are ongoing integrations with Java, .NET, Go, Rust, Haskell, OCaml.

All of them much more mature than Swift, outside Apple's eco-system, including being able to target CUDA.

Also C++17/C++20 isn't that bad.

I learned C++ARM at the age of 16, and many Portuguese universities teach it at first year students, surely newcomers can grok it.

C++ isn't that bad if you already know it. I agree. I enjoy programming in C++ myself. For anyone just starting out, it's pretty horrifying, which is why there aren't a lot of experienced C++ programmers around. Its worst trait is that it encourages excessive cleverness, and left unchecked that can very quickly make any code impossible to understand.

Also Portuguese universities seem to be out of sync with the rest of the world if they teach C++. In the US most people with a CS degree haven't been exposed to C++. It's either Java or something functional. C++ typically doesn't even come up. Which is pretty puzzling to me, because most of the programs I use daily (including this very browser) are C++ programs.

Portuguese universities aren't the only ones, I am pretty sure many of the other European ones do the same.

Also, I actually learned C++ during high school, back when C++ARM was the only "standard", and most C compilers still did a mix of K&R and C89.

Nowadays many high schools do stuff with Raspeberry PI and Arduinos (Processing is just C++).

And you have books like these available https://www.amazon.de/f%C3%BCr-Kids-Grundlagen-Spieleprogram...

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