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Comment by smcleod | Hacker News Reader

Weird that it’s for beginners without saying what it actually is. Machine learning for infrared? Machine learning inference? Or Is it talking about compilers (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLIR_(software))

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MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) is an LLVM project made to address some of the shortcomings of LLVM IR. Many languages using LLVM as a backend (e.g. Swift, Rust) have have resorted to defining their own IRs because dropping all the way down to LLVM IR loses almost all of a language’s semantics.

It’s pretty obviously about compilers. From the first article:

> As we announced recently, my team at Google has started a new effort to build production-worthy engineering tools for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). One focal point of this, and one which I’ll be focusing on as long as Google is willing to pay me to do so, is building out a compiler toolchain for FHE in the MLIR framework (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation). The project is called Homomorphic Encryption Intermediate Representation, or HEIR

And MLIR there links to the MLIR project page.

Right, this would be great to put in the README is opposed to behind another link.

Your definition of obvious is quite strange. I have to go from HN to the github to another link (the right one) to figure you what the hell is going on.

I mean, the github repo's README says:

> This is the code repository for a series of articles on the MLIR framework.

And then has links to the (currently written) articles, the first one with "(Getting Started)" in the title. Seems like an obvious place to, you know, start reading about things.

I mean, as opposed to putting 2 lines of markdown that explain what the project is about in the github repositories instead forcing another level of indirection on the user. Seems like an obvious place to, you know, start reading about things.

look it's really simple: if this is too difficult for you to understand, no one is actually forcing you to learn any of it. on the contrary, if you're motivated enough, you'll figure out the answers to these and other trivial questions before starting the tutorial.

Yeah that’s sort of the idea behind the web—click the right links to learn more.

https://mlir.llvm.org/

exactly - it's not like we're not literally sitting here engaging with this using an interface/medium that enables you to immediately figure out the definition of a word/phrase/etc.

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