While I’m a fan of Swift and am glad that it’s getting a lot more attention outside of the iOS world, I’m not sure if it’s the best language to be used in the data/ML world. Yes, it’s faster than Python, yes it’s almost as easy to read, and yes its standard library is powerful. But when interacting with Swift as a framework, I can’t imagine how much of a pain in the ass the strict type system will be for researchers. I get it. Types help people developers write less error prone code and blah blah. But the main target here are ML researchers. They aren’t developers. They just want to write down their theory in code and just run to train their models. They aren’t writing complex iOS apps here.
To me this seem attractive for those that want to put ML into production.
Having a solid type system and an easily interoperable language could lead to a lot less bad surprises than using python.
