Enzyme VS jax

Compare Enzyme vs jax and see what are their differences.

Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
Enzyme jax
16 82
1,157 27,936
3.4% 4.0%
9.7 10.0
1 day ago 3 days ago
LLVM Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
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.

Enzyme

Posts with mentions or reviews of Enzyme. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-12-06.
  • Show HN: Curve Fitting Bezier Curves in WASM with Enzyme Ad
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Oct 2023
    Automatic differentiation is done using https://enzyme.mit.edu/
  • Ask HN: What Happened to TensorFlow Swift
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 May 2023
    lattner left google and was the primary reason they chose swift, so they lost interest.

    if you're asking from an ML perspective, i believe the original motivation was to incorporate automatic differentiation in the swift compiler. i believe enzyme is the spiritual successor.

    https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme

  • Show HN: Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2022
    https://ispc.github.io/ispc.html

    For the auto-differentiation when I need performance or memory, I currently use tapenade ( http://tapenade.inria.fr:8080/tapenade/index.jsp ) and/or manually written gradient when I need to fuse some kernel, but Enzyme ( https://enzyme.mit.edu/ ) is also very promising.

    MPI for parallelization across machines.

  • Do you consider making a physics engine (for RL) worth it?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 8 Oct 2022
    For autodiff, we are currently working again on publishing a new Enzyme (https://enzyme.mit.edu) Frontend for Rust which can also handle pure Rust types, first version should be done in ~ a week.
  • What is a really cool thing you would want to write in Rust but don't have enough time, energy or bravery for?
    21 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jun 2022
    Have you taken a look at enzymeAD? There is a group porting it to rust.
  • The Julia language has a number of correctness flaws
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 May 2022
    Enzyme dev here, so take everything I say as being a bit biased:

    While, by design Enzyme is able to run very fast by operating within the compiler (see https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/file/9332c513ef44b... for details) -- it aggressively prioritizes correctness. Of course that doesn't mean that there aren't bugs (we're only human and its a large codebase [https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme], especially if you're trying out newly-added features).

    Notably, this is where the current rough edges for Julia users are -- Enzyme will throw an error saying it couldn't prove correctness, rather than running (there is a flag for "making a best guess, but that's off by default"). The exception to this is garbage collection, for which you can either run a static analysis, or stick to the "officially supported" subset of Julia that Enzyme specifies.

    Incidentally, this is also where being a cross-language tool is really nice -- namely we can see edge cases/bug reports from any LLVM-based language (C/C++, Fortran, Swift, Rust, Python, Julia, etc). So far the biggest code we've handled (and verified correctness for) was O(1million) lines of LLVM from some C++ template hell.

    I will also add that while I absolutely love (and will do everything I can to support) Enzyme being used throughout arbitrary Julia code: in addition to exposing a nice user-facing interface for custom rules in the Enzyme Julia bindings like Chris mentioned, some Julia-specific features (such as full garbage collection support) also need handling in Enzyme.jl, before Enzyme can be considered an "all Julia AD" framework. We are of course working on all of these things (and the more the merrier), but there's only a finite amount of time in the day. [^]

    [^] Incidentally, this is in contrast to say C++/Fortran/Swift/etc, where Enzyme has much closer to whole-language coverage than Julia -- this isn't anything against GC/Julia/etc, but we just have things on our todo list.

  • Jax vs. Julia (Vs PyTorch)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 May 2022
    Idk, Enzyme is pretty next gen, all the way down to LLVM code.

    https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme

  • What's everyone working on this week (7/2022)?
    15 projects | /r/rust | 14 Feb 2022
    I'm working on merging my build-tool for (oxide)-enzyme into Enzyme itself. Also looking into improving the documentation.
  • Wsmoses/Enzyme: High-performance automatic differentiation of LLVM
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2022
  • Trade-Offs in Automatic Differentiation: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Jax, and Julia
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2021
    that seems one of the points of enzyme[1], which was mentioned in the article.

    [1] - https://enzyme.mit.edu/

    being able in effect do interprocedural cross language analysis seems awesome.

jax

Posts with mentions or reviews of jax. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-22.
  • The Elements of Differentiable Programming
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Mar 2024
    The dual numbers exist just as surely as the real numbers and have been used well over 100 years

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number

    Pytorch has had them for many years.

    https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.autograd.for...

    JAX implements them and uses them exactly as stated in this thread.

    https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/10157#discussionco...

    As you so eloquently stated, "you shouldn't be proclaiming things you don't actually know on a public forum," and doubly so when your claimed "corrections" are so demonstrably and totally incorrect.

  • Julia GPU-based ODE solver 20x-100x faster than those in Jax and PyTorch
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Dec 2023
    On your last point, as long as you jit the topmost level, it doesn't matter whether or not you have inner jitted functions. The end result should be the same.

    Source: https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/5199#discussioncom...

  • Apple releases MLX for Apple Silicon
    4 projects | /r/LocalLLaMA | 8 Dec 2023
    The design of MLX is inspired by frameworks like NumPy, PyTorch, Jax, and ArrayFire.
  • MLPerf training tests put Nvidia ahead, Intel close, and Google well behind
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2023
    I'm still not totally sure what the issue is. Jax uses program transformations to compile programs to run on a variety of hardware, for example, using XLA for TPUs. It can also run cuda ops for Nvidia gpus without issue: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

    There is also support for custom cpp and cuda ops if that's what is needed: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Custom_Operation_for_GP...

    I haven't worked with float4, but can imagine that new numerical types would require some special handling. But I assume that's the case for any ml environment.

    But really you probably mean fixed point 4bit integer types? Looks like that has had at least some work done in Jax: https://github.com/google/jax/issues/8566

  • MatX: Efficient C++17 GPU numerical computing library with Python-like syntax
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Oct 2023
    >

    Are they even comparing apples to apples to claim that they see these improvements over NumPy?

    > While the code complexity and length are roughly the same, the MatX version shows a 2100x over the Numpy version, and over 4x faster than the CuPy version on the same GPU.

    NumPy doesn't use GPU by default unless you use something like Jax [1] to compile NumPy code to run on GPUs. I think more honest comparison will mainly compare MatX running on same CPU like NumPy as focus the GPU comparison against CuPy.

    [1] https://github.com/google/jax

  • JAX – NumPy on the CPU, GPU, and TPU, with great automatic differentiation
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Sep 2023
    Actually that never changed. The README has always had an example of differentiating through native Python control flow:

    https://github.com/google/jax/commit/948a8db0adf233f333f3e5f...

    The constraints on control flow expressions come from jax.jit (because Python control flow can't be staged out) and jax.vmap (because we can't take multiple branches of Python control flow, which we might need to do for different batch elements). But autodiff of Python-native control flow works fine!

  • Julia and Mojo (Modular) Mandelbrot Benchmark
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Sep 2023
    For a similar "benchmark" (also Mandelbrot) but took place in Jax repo discussion: https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/11078#discussionco...
  • Functional Programming 1
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Aug 2023
    2. https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land (A bit heavy on jargon)

    Note there is a python version of Ramda available on pypi and there’s a lot of FP tidbits inside JAX:

    3. https://pypi.org/project/ramda/ (Worth making your own version if you want to learn, though)

    4. For nested data, JAX tree_util is epic: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jax.tree_util.html and also their curry implementation is funny: https://github.com/google/jax/blob/4ac2bdc2b1d71ec0010412a32...

    Anyway don’t put FP on a pedestal, main thing is to focus on the core principles of avoiding external mutation and making helper functions. Doesn’t always work because some languages like Rust don’t have legit support for currying (afaik in 2023 August), but in those cases you can hack it with builder methods to an extent.

    Finally, if you want to understand the middle of the midwit meme, check out this wiki article and connect the free monoid to the Kleene star (0 or more copies of your pattern) and Kleene plus (1 or more copies of your pattern). Those are also in regex so it can help you remember the regex symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_monoid?wprov=sfti1

    The simplest example might be {0}^* in which case

    0: “” // because we use *

  • Best Way to Learn JAX
    1 project | /r/learnmachinelearning | 13 May 2023
    Hello! I'm trying to learn JAX over the next couple of weeks. Ideally, I want to be comfortable with using it for projects after about 3 weeks to a month, although I understand that may not be realistic. I currently have experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow. How should I go about learning JAX? Is there a specific YouTube tutorial or online course I should use, or should I just use the tutorial on https://jax.readthedocs.io/? Any information, advice, or experience you can share would be much appreciated!
  • Codon: Python Compiler
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 May 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Enzyme and jax you can also consider the following projects:

Zygote.jl - 21st century AD

Numba - NumPy aware dynamic Python compiler using LLVM

Flux.jl - Relax! Flux is the ML library that doesn't make you tensor

functorch - functorch is JAX-like composable function transforms for PyTorch.

Pytorch - Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration

julia - The Julia Programming Language

Lux.jl - Explicitly Parameterized Neural Networks in Julia

linfa - A Rust machine learning framework.

Cython - The most widely used Python to C compiler

faust - Functional programming language for signal processing and sound synthesis

jax-windows-builder - A community supported Windows build for jax.