Swift as a Numerical Computations Language

Deep Learning
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Recently I’ve seen Jeremy’s post about using Swift as a modern compiled language for numerical computations. I’ve started playing with swift a couple years ago, mostly for iOS development, and I agree that the language has a lot of awesome traits. I was very impressed when started using it, and every once in a while I am checking if there are any new libraries and frameworks for numerical computations and deep learning in this language. A great language with a bunch of cool toolsets and IDEs definitely deserves one’s attention.

So I wonder if anyone here uses this language for “general-purpose” development? I mean, writing web apps, console tools, etc. I would be happy to know about your experience and learning sources. There are plenty of tutorials about iOS/macOS development but probably not so many information about “plain” Swift coding.

Have anybody used Surge or maybe directly played with Accelerate? Am I right that idea behind BaseMath package from the aforementioned post is to implement numerical operations directly in Swift instead of building wrappers on top of C libraries?

I would like to use this language as a high-performance but still an easy-to-use alternative to C/C++ development (which makes me feel sad :smile:) Would be glad to know about your experience.

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i have used xamarin (c#) for IOS android. Xamarin is now part of visual studio code

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Yeah, that’s correct, but I would like to know more about native Swift development and not iOS development per se :slight_smile:

Also, I am quite interested in Metal though don’t know too much about this language. Is it something compatible with CUDA? In terms of performance and capabilities?

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metal, opengl and cuda are not comptable.

here is a good starting point: https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/

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Yes, correct. However, for the sake of clarity, here is more thorough explanation of my question :slight_smile:

I would like to know more about experience of people who use the Swift language in the field, outside Apple’s platforms and UI-driven apps. I know about CoreML framework but it is not a part of Swift language. So I wonder if somebody tried to write numerical computations using Swift/Metal, as one would do with C++/CUDA.

One day I would like to use Swift as a cross-platform language for things outside of Apple’s ecosystem. I know the language is already open-sourced, and LLVM is great. And, there are already a lot of web frameworks running on Linux machines driven by Swift. So I imagine that one day this language​ could become a great alternative for other compiled languages used for high-performant and time-critical computations.

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