Distributions.jl
diffrax
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Distributions.jl | diffrax | |
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6 | 21 | |
1,066 | 1,217 | |
0.6% | - | |
7.6 | 8.3 | |
7 days ago | 4 days ago | |
Julia | Python | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | Apache License 2.0 |
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Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Distributions.jl
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Yann Lecun: ML would have advanced if other lang had been adopted versus Python
If you look at Julia open source projects you'll see that the projects tend to have a lot more contributors than the Python counterparts, even over smaller time periods. A package for defining statistical distributions has had 202 contributors (https://github.com/JuliaStats/Distributions.jl), etc. Julia Base even has had over 1,300 contributors (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia) which is quite a lot for a core language, and that's mostly because the majority of the core is in Julia itself.
This is one of the things that was noted quite a bit at this SIAM CSE conference, that Julia development tends to have a lot more code reuse than other ecosystems like Python. For example, the various machine learning libraries like Flux.jl and Lux.jl share a lot of layer intrinsics in NNlib.jl (https://github.com/FluxML/NNlib.jl), the same GPU libraries (https://github.com/JuliaGPU/CUDA.jl), the same automatic differentiation library (https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl), and of course the same JIT compiler (Julia itself). These two libraries are far enough apart that people say "Flux is to PyTorch as Lux is to JAX/flax", but while in the Python world those share almost 0 code or implementation, in the Julia world they share >90% of the core internals but have different higher levels APIs.
If one hasn't participated in this space it's a bit hard to fathom how much code reuse goes on and how that is influenced by the design of multiple dispatch. This is one of the reasons there is so much cohesion in the community since it doesn't matter if one person is an ecologist and the other is a financial engineer, you may both be contributing to the same library like Distances.jl just adding a distance function which is then used in thousands of places. With the Python ecosystem you tend to have a lot more "megapackages", PyTorch, SciPy, etc. where the barrier to entry is generally a lot higher (and sometimes requires handling the build systems, fun times). But in the Julia ecosystem you have a lot of core development happening in "small" but central libraries, like Distances.jl or Distributions.jl, which are simple enough for an undergrad to get productive in a week but is then used everywhere (Distributions.jl for example is used in every statistics package, and definitions of prior distributions for Turing.jl's probabilistic programming language, etc.).
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Don't waste your time on Julia
...so the blog post you've posted 4 times contains a list of issues the author filed in 2020-2021... and at least for the handful I clicked, they indeed have (long) been sorted. e.g., Filed Dec 18th 2020, closed Dec 20th
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Julia ranks in the top most loved programming languages for 2022
Well, out of the issues mentioned, the ones still open can be categorized as (1) aliasing problems with mutable vectors https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/39385 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/39460 (2) not handling OffsetArrays correctly https://github.com/JuliaStats/StatsBase.jl/issues/646, https://github.com/JuliaStats/StatsBase.jl/issues/638, https://github.com/JuliaStats/Distributions.jl/issues/1265 https://github.com/JuliaStats/StatsBase.jl/issues/643 (3) bad interaction of buffering and I/O redirection https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/36069 (4) a type dispatch bug https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/41096
So if you avoid mutable vectors and OffsetArrays you should generally be fine.
As far as the argument "Julia is really buggy so it's unusable", I think this can be made for any language - e.g. rand is not random enough, Java's binary search algorithm had an overflow, etc. The fixed issues have tests added so they won't happen again. Maybe copying the test suites from libraries in other languages would have caught these issues earlier, but a new system will have more bugs than a mature system so some amount of bugginess is unavoidable.
- The Julia language has a number of correctness flaws
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Does a Julia package have to live in a separate file?
See the Distributions.jl package for an example .jl file structure: https://github.com/JuliaStats/Distributions.jl/tree/master/src
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Organizing a Julia program
Structure your program around your domain specific constrains, e.g if you look at Distributions.jl they have folders for univariate/multivariate or discrete/continuous with a file per distribution containing the struct + all its methods :
diffrax
- Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
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[P] Optimistix, nonlinear optimisation in JAX+Equinox!
Optimistix has high-level APIs for minimisation, least-squares, root-finding, and fixed-point iteration and was written to take care of these kinds of subroutines in Diffrax.
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Show HN: Optimistix: Nonlinear Optimisation in Jax+Equinox
Diffrax (https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax).
Here is the GitHub: https://github.com/patrick-kidger/optimistix
The elevator pitch is Optimistix is really fast, especially to compile. It
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Scientific computing in JAX
Sure. So I've got some PyTorch benchmarks here. The main take-away so far has been that for a neural ODE, the backward pass takes about 50% longer in PyTorch, and the forward (inference) pass takes an incredible 100x longer.
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[D] JAX vs PyTorch in 2023
FWIW this worked for me. :D My full-time job is now writing JAX libraries at Google. Equinox for neural networks, Diffrax for differential equation solvers, etc.
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Returning to snake's nest after a long journey, any major advances in python for science ?
It's relatively early days yet, but JAX is in the process of developing its nascent scientific computing / scientific machine learning ecosystem. Mostly because of its strong autodifferentiation capabilities, excellent JIT compiler etc. (E.g. to show off one of my own projects, Diffrax is the library of diffeq solvers for JAX.)
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What's the best thing/library you learned this year ?
Diffrax - solving ODEs with Jax and computing it's derivatives automatically functools - love partial and lru_cache fastprogress - simpler progress bar than tqdm
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PyTorch 2.0
At least prior to this announcement: JAX was much faster than PyTorch for differentiable physics. (Better JIT compiler; reduced Python-level overhead.)
E.g for numerical ODE simulation, I've found that Diffrax (https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax) is ~100 times faster than torchdiffeq on the forward pass. The backward pass is much closer, and for this Diffrax is about 1.5 times faster.
It remains to be seen how PyTorch 2.0 will compare, or course!
Right now my job is actually building out the scientific computing ecosystem in JAX, so feel free to ping me with any other questions.
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Python 3.11 is much faster than 3.8
https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax
Which are neural network and differential equation libraries for JAX.
[Obligatory I-am-googler-my-opinions-do-not-represent- your-employer...]
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Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
Autodifferentiable programming!
Neural networks are the famous example of this, of course -- but this can be extended to all of scientific computing. ODE/SDE solvers, root-finding algorithms, LQP, molecular dynamics, ...
These days I'm doing all my work in JAX. (E.g. see Equinox or Diffrax: https://github.com/patrick-kidger/equinox, https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax). A lot of modern work is now based around hybridising such techniques with neural networks.
I'd really encourage anyone interested to learn how JAX works under-the-hood as well. (Look up "autodidax") Lots of clever/novel ideas in its design.
What are some alternatives?
MLJ.jl - A Julia machine learning framework
deepxde - A library for scientific machine learning and physics-informed learning
HypothesisTests.jl - Hypothesis tests for Julia
tiny-cuda-nn - Lightning fast C++/CUDA neural network framework
Optimization.jl - Mathematical Optimization in Julia. Local, global, gradient-based and derivative-free. Linear, Quadratic, Convex, Mixed-Integer, and Nonlinear Optimization in one simple, fast, and differentiable interface.
juliaup - Julia installer and version multiplexer
StatsBase.jl - Basic statistics for Julia
flax - Flax is a neural network library for JAX that is designed for flexibility.
Lux.jl - Explicitly Parameterized Neural Networks in Julia
equinox - Elegant easy-to-use neural networks + scientific computing in JAX. https://docs.kidger.site/equinox/
StaticLint.jl - Static Code Analysis for Julia
vectorflow