dfdx VS tch-rs

I keep checking the progress on dfdx for this reason. It does what I (and, I assume from context, you) want: Provides static checking of tensor shapes. Which is fantastic. Not quite as much inference as I'd like but I love getting compile-time errors that I forgot to transpose before a matmul.

It depends on the generic_const_exprs feature which is still, to quote, "highly experimental":

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/76560

Definitely not for production use, but it gives a flavor for where things can head in the medium term, and it's .. it's nice. You could imagine future type support allowing even more inference for some intermediate shapes, of course, but even what it has now is really nice. Like this cute little convnet example:

https://github.com/coreylowman/dfdx/blob/main/examples/night...

And for transformers, it's really early days for dfdx, but it's a library that aims to sit basically at the Pytorch level of abstraction, that the difference is it's not just coded in Rust, but it follows the Rust-y/functional-y philosophy of "if it compiles it runs".

Wow that is super interesting. I actually tried to use GATs at first to be generic over shapes, but I couldn't do it, I'm sure it would be possible in the future though. There is this library dfdx that does something similar to what you mentioned, but it feels a little clumsy to me.

Awesome, I added an issue here https://github.com/coreylowman/dfdx/issues/597. We can discuss more there! The first step will just be adding the device and implementing tensor creation methods for it.

The next release of dfdx includes a CUDA device and implements many ops. The same dev created a new crate, cudarc, for a wrapper around CUDA toolkit.

A question I have is: what are the philosophical/design differences with dfdx? As someone who's played around with dfdx and only skimmed the README of burn, it seems like dfdx leans into Rust's type system/type inference for compile time checking of as much as is possible to check at compile time. I wonder if you've gotten a chance to look at dfdx and would like to outline what you think the differences are. Thanks!

I wanted to do something like this but then I would miss on proper CUDA acceleration and lose performance compared to using torchlib.

I wrote a forgettable llama implementation for https://github.com/LaurentMazare/tch-rs (pytorch's torchlib rust binding).

I first encountered OCaml's PyTorch bindings because apparently they generate a C wrapper around PyTorch's C++ API, and Rust's PyTorch bindings use OCaml's C wrapper. See: https://github.com/LaurentMazare/tch-rs

You could try looking at the min-GPT example of tch-rs. I'd also strongly suggest watching Karpathy's video to understand what's going on.

If you pefer to see it in code there's a succint gpt implementation here https://github.com/LaurentMazare/tch-rs/blob/main/examples/m...

Rust is fully compatible w/ C bindings, so even Python libraries written in C can be easily set up to work in Rust (and have been). For example, see PyTorch Rust bindings, which actually works faster than in Python because all of the glue code around the C++ API is in Rust instead of Python.

Pytorch

I have looked into this a bit and found some crates which help in loading torchscript models called tch-rs