Lux.jl VS julia

Compare Lux.jl vs julia and see what are their differences.

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Lux.jl julia
4 350
429 44,510
7.9% 0.9%
9.5 10.0
4 days ago 3 days ago
Julia Julia
MIT License MIT License
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.

Lux.jl

Posts with mentions or reviews of Lux.jl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-27.
  • Julia 1.10 Released
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
  • [R] Easiest way to train RNN's in MATLAB or Julia?
    1 project | /r/MachineLearning | 24 Jan 2023
    There is also the less known Lux.jl package: https://github.com/avik-pal/Lux.jl
  • “Why I still recommend Julia”
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jun 2022
    Can you point to a concrete example of one that someone would run into when using the differential equation solvers with the default and recommended Enzyme AD for vector-Jacobian products? I'd be happy to look into it, but there do not currently seem to be any correctness issues in the Enzyme issue tracker that are current (3 issues are open but they all seem to be fixed, other than https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme.jl/issues/278 which is actually an activity analysis bug in LLVM). So please be more specific. The issue with Enzyme right now seems to moreso be about finding functional forms that compile, and it throws compile-time errors in the event that it cannot fully analyze the program and if it has too much dynamic behavior (example: https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme.jl/issues/368).

    Additional note, we recently did a overhaul of SciMLSensitivity (https://sensitivity.sciml.ai/dev/) and setup a system which amounts to 15 hours of direct unit tests doing a combinatoric check of arguments with 4 hours of downstream testing (https://github.com/SciML/SciMLSensitivity.jl/actions/runs/25...). What that identified is that any remaining issues that can arise are due to the implicit parameters mechanism in Zygote (Zygote.params). To counteract this upstream issue, we (a) try to default to never default to Zygote VJPs whenever we can avoid it (hence defaulting to Enzyme and ReverseDiff first as previously mentioned), and (b) put in a mechanism for early error throwing if Zygote hits any not implemented derivative case with an explicit error message (https://github.com/SciML/SciMLSensitivity.jl/blob/v7.0.1/src...). We have alerted the devs of the machine learning libraries, and from this there has been a lot of movement. In particular, a globals-free machine learning library, Lux.jl, was created with fully explicit parameters https://lux.csail.mit.edu/dev/, and thus by design it cannot have this issue. In addition, the Flux.jl library itself is looking to do a redesign that eliminates implicit parameters (https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl/issues/1986). Which design will be the one in the end, that's uncertain right now, but it's clear that no matter what the future designs of the deep learning libraries will fully cut out that part of Zygote.jl. And additionally, the other AD libraries (Enzyme and Diffractor for example) do not have this "feature", so it's an issue that can only arise from a specific (not recommended) way of using Zygote (which now throws explicit error messages early and often if used anywhere near SciML because I don't tolerate it).

    So from this, SciML should be rather safe and if not, please share some details and I'd be happy to dig in.

  • The Julia language has a number of correctness flaws
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 May 2022
    Lots of things are being rewritten. Remember we just released a new neural network library the other day, SimpleChains.jl, and showed that it gave about a 10x speed improvement on modern CPUs with multithreading enabled vs Jax Equinox (and 22x when AVX-512 is enabled) for smaller neural network and matrix-vector types of cases (https://julialang.org/blog/2022/04/simple-chains/). Then there's Lux.jl fixing some major issues of Flux.jl (https://github.com/avik-pal/Lux.jl). Pretty much everything is switching to Enzyme which improves performance quite a bit over Zygote and allows for full mutation support (https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme.jl). So an entire machine learning stack is already seeing parts release.

    Right now we're in a bit of an uncomfortable spot where we have to use Zygote for a few things and then Enzyme for everything else, but the custom rules system is rather close and that's the piece that's needed to make the full transition.

julia

Posts with mentions or reviews of julia. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-06.
  • Top Paying Programming Technologies 2024
    19 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2024
    34. Julia - $74,963
  • Optimize sgemm on RISC-V platform
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    I don't believe there is any official documentation on this, but https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/49430 for example added prefetching to the marking phase of a GC which saw speedups on x86, but not on M1.
  • Dart 3.3
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    3. dispatch on all the arguments

    the first solution is clean, but people really like dispatch.

    the second makes calling functions in the function call syntax weird, because the first argument is privileged semantically but not syntactically.

    the third makes calling functions in the method call syntax weird because the first argument is privileged syntactically but not semantically.

    the closest things to this i can think of off the top of my head in remotely popular programming languages are: nim, lisp dialects, and julia.

    nim navigates the dispatch conundrum by providing different ways to define free functions for different dispatch-ness. the tutorial gives a good overview: https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut2.html

    lisps of course lack UFCS.

    see here for a discussion on the lack of UFCS in julia: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/31779

    so to sum up the answer to the original question: because it's only obvious how to make it nice and tidy like you're wanting if you sacrifice function dispatch, which is ubiquitous for good reason!

  • Julia 1.10 Highlights
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
    https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/release-1.10/NEWS.md
  • Best Programming languages for Data Analysis📊
    4 projects | dev.to | 7 Dec 2023
    Visit official site: https://julialang.org/
  • Potential of the Julia programming language for high energy physics computing
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Dec 2023
    No. It runs natively on ARM.

    julia> versioninfo() Julia Version 1.9.3 Commit bed2cd540a1 (2023-08-24 14:43 UTC) Build Info: Official https://julialang.org/ release

  • Rust std:fs slower than Python
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023
    https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/51086#issuecomment...

    So while this "fixes" the issue, it'll introduce a confusing time delay between you freeing the memory and you observing that in `htop`.

    But according to https://jemalloc.net/jemalloc.3.html you can set `opt.muzzy_decay_ms = 0` to remove the delay.

    Still, the musl author has some reservations against making `jemalloc` the default:

    https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2018/04/23/2

    > It's got serious bloat problems, problems with undermining ASLR, and is optimized pretty much only for being as fast as possible without caring how much memory you use.

    With the above-mentioned tunables, this should be mitigated to some extent, but the general "theme" (focusing on e.g. performance vs memory usage) will likely still mean "it's a tradeoff" or "it's no tradeoff, but only if you set tunables to what you need".

  • Eleven strategies for making reproducible research the norm
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Nov 2023
    I have asked about Julia's reproducibility story on the Guix mailing list in the past, and at the time Simon Tournier didn't think it was promising. I seem to recall Julia itself didnt have a reproducible build. All I know now is that github issue is still not closed.

    https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/34753

  • Julia as a unifying end-to-end workflow language on the Frontier exascale system
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Nov 2023
    I don't really know what kind of rebuttal you're looking for, but I will link my HN comments from when this was first posted for some thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861#31398796. As I said, in the linked post, I'm quite skeptical of the business of trying to assess relative buginess of programming in different systems, because that has strong dependencies on what you consider core vs packages and what exactly you're trying to do.

    However, bugs in general suck and we've been thinking a fair bit about what additional tooling the language could provide to help people avoid the classes of bugs that Yuri encountered in the post.

    The biggest class of problems in the blog post, is that it's pretty clear that `@inbounds` (and I will extend this to `@assume_effects`, even though that wasn't around when Yuri wrote his post) is problematic, because it's too hard to write. My proposal for what to do instead is at https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/50641.

    Another common theme is that while Julia is great at composition, it's not clear what's expected to work and what isn't, because the interfaces are informal and not checked. This is a hard design problem, because it's quite close to the reasons why Julia works well. My current thoughts on that are here: https://github.com/Keno/InterfaceSpecs.jl but there's other proposals also.

  • Getaddrinfo() on glibc calls getenv(), oh boy
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Oct 2023
    Doesn't musl have the same issue? https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/34726#issuecomment...

    I also wonder about OSX's libc. Newer versions seem to have some sort of locking https://github.com/apple-open-source-mirror/Libc/blob/master...

    but older versions (from 10.9) don't have any lockign: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Libc/blob/Libc-99...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Lux.jl and julia you can also consider the following projects:

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

jax - Composable transformations of Python+NumPy programs: differentiate, vectorize, JIT to GPU/TPU, and more

Enzyme - High-performance automatic differentiation of LLVM and MLIR.

NetworkX - Network Analysis in Python

Enzyme.jl - Julia bindings for the Enzyme automatic differentiator

Lua - Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description.

StatsBase.jl - Basic statistics for Julia

rust-numpy - PyO3-based Rust bindings of the NumPy C-API

BetaML.jl - Beta Machine Learning Toolkit

Numba - NumPy aware dynamic Python compiler using LLVM

Distributions.jl - A Julia package for probability distributions and associated functions.

F# - Please file issues or pull requests here: https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp