hydra VS strictyaml

Nice tool, only unfortunate name, consider changing it. Already very well know security tool named hydra https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra been around since 2001. Then facebook went ahead and named their config tool hydra https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra on top of it. Like we get it, hydra popular mythology but we could use more original naming for tools

This looks really impressive, and I'm excited to see how it performs on our data!

P.S., I think the name conflicts with Hydra, the configuration management library: https://hydra.cc/

I've been trying to learn PyTorch Lightning and Hydra in order to use/create my own custom deep learning template (e.g. like this) as it would greatly help with my research workflow. A lot of the work I do requires me to analyse metrics based on the logits/activations of the model.

However, hydra seems to have several limitations that are really annoying and are making me reconsider my choice. Most problematic is the inability to group parameters together in a multirun. Hydra only supports trying all combinations of parameters, as described in https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/1258, which does not seem to be a priority for hydra. Furthermore, hydras optuna optimizer implementation does not allow for early pruning of bad runs, which while not a deal breaker is definitely a nice to have feature.

Do you hate the fact that they don't let you return the config file: https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/407

I kind of built this due to frustrations with Hydra. Hydra is an end to end framework, it locks you into a certain DL project format, it decides logging, model saving and a whole host of things. For example Hydra can do the same config file overwriting that I allow but you have to store the config file with the name config.yaml inside a specific folder. On top of that hydra doesn’t let you return the config file from the main function so you have to put all the major logic in the main function itself (link), the authors claim this is by design. I can find Hydra useful for a mature less experimental project. But in my robotics and ML research, I like being able to write code where I want and integrating it how I want, especially when debugging for which I think this package is useful. TLDR; If you just want the config file functionality use my package, if you want a complete DL project manager use Hydra. While hydra implements this config file functionality, it also adds a lot of restrictions to project structure that you might not like.

For managing configs of ML experiments (where each experiment can override a base config, and "variant" configs can further override the experiment config, etc), Hydra + Yaml + OmegaConf is really nice.

https://hydra.cc/

I admit I don't fully understand all the advanced options in Hydra, but the basic usage is already very useful. A nice guide is here:

https://florianwilhelm.info/2022/01/configuration_via_yaml_a...

NestedText already is the way I use YAML; everything is intepreted as a string. I have some trust in my YAML parser to not mangle most strings. I could use NestedText, but users would be unfamiliar with it, and IIRC the only parsers are in Python. But then I could use StrictYaml too https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml

you can stick to a subset of YAML syntax (e.g. strictYAML)

YAML stands for "YAML Ain’t Markup Language" - this is known as a recursive acronym. YAML is often used for writing configuration files. It’s human readable, easy to understand and can be used with other programming languages. Although YAML is commonly used in many disciplines, it has received criticism on the amoutn of whitespace .yml files have, difficulty in editing, and complexity of the standard. Despite the criticism, properly using YAML ensures that you can reproduce the results of a project and makes sure that the virtual environment packages play nicely with system packages. (If you're looking for another way to share environments there are other alternatives to YAML which include StrictYAML (a type-safe YAML parser) and NestedText)

The example you linked provides this as an example of a YAML document that he wants his format to support.

That safe subset exists and is implemented in a number of languages. It is called strict-yaml: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/

StrictYAML\ (33 comments)

To me those are in the category of "nice to have", and the problem is that every developer has different preferences for these [1] [2]. But the main features of StrictYaml, like supporting comments and less syntactic noise, I think are pretty uncontroversial, and perhaps it's worth it to get people to switch over for those alone. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be a significant enough improvement over JSON, and I'd say those two features are more than enough

[1]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/37

[2]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/38