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Going back to the Tensorflow C API and adding plotting + networking + async capability is a smart engineering choice.

Will this project expand faster than Tensorflow Python to make it worth investing in? We will see in the coming months :)



Python has a larger ecosystem for data intensive application and pratictoners. As a language it's very easy to learn for JavaScript devs.

The only "killer" feature JS may bring to the table would be client side, browser based inference that leverages GPU. But we're eons away from that.


I get your point, I think it is a bit reductive.

I agree that JS is king in client side from PWA, desktop and native (with react), but also in async/API/distributed architecture. From a web server point of view, it took a large share of what usually went to Rails or PHP. It is a trend here to stay.

JS is also the largest community of devs, with 12M people very well versed in UX and ergonomics, something ML desperately needs to deploy faster.

Finally JS is a fast moving and innovative language due to many factors, from the fact we have several implementations, a light process for the tc39, transpilers, typescript/flow and wasm... What JS lacks from a syntax point of view may be adopted in months.

So wait and see, history is not written yet.


Agreed. Scientific computing has centered on two languages for well over a decade. I don’t think JavaScript is going to dethrone python as the interpreted language of choice because it can now push computation to the GPU via a well designed API.


Arguably the only "killer" feature Python has is the ecosystem. There are efforts to build out a similar ecosystem for JS. For example https://github.com/jacobbogers/libRmath.js is a typescript port of R's core math library https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/nmath/


And the full force of the entire machine learning research community (except for a few still on Lua/Torch).


We JS folks just need 1 good deep-learning system in JS. I really want that system to be propel as it leverages the work that has gone in on tensorflow. Let that piece fall into place, and just watch as the last bastion of python gets overrun.


>>...watch as the last bastion of python gets overrun

That is a naive point of view. The python community has been growing for decades [1]. Even if it is not growing as fast as javascript community, the growth is sustainable, and probably won't slow until the companies that rely on it for core parts of their infrastructure are gone (that could be 5 decades). Google, youtube, instagram, and countless other enormous corporations with trillions of dollars in combined market cap are dependent on it. Python isn't going anywhere.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...


How do you figure that deep learning is "the last bastion of python". From where I'm sitting deep learning is just the newest of many bastions.


Also JS has possibilities for better interactive visualization using D3 and other things.


Does the tensorflow C API use CUDA if you have it installed?




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