Numba VS jax

Around the same time, I discovered Numba and was fascinated by how easily it could bring huge performance improvements to Python code.

Simulations are, at least in my experience, numba’s [0] wheelhouse.

[0]: https://numba.pydata.org/

That's very cool. Numba introduces just-in-time compilation to Python via decorators and its sole reason for being is to turn everything it can into abstract syntax trees.

A super-fast backtesting engine built in NumPy and accelerated with Numba.

Regarding speed, I don't agree this is a good argument against Python. For example, it seems no one here has yet mentioned numba, a Python JIT compiler. With a simple decorator you can compile a function to machine code with speeds on par with C. Numba also allows you to easily write cuda kernels for GPU computation. I've never had to drop down to writing C or C++ to write fast and performant Python code that does computationally demanding tasks thanks to numba.

Just for reference,

* Nuitka[0] "is a Python compiler written in Python. It's fully compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11."

* Pypy[1] "is a replacement for CPython" with builtin optimizations such as on the fly JIT compiles.

* Cython[2] "is an optimising static compiler for both the Python programming language and the extended Cython programming language... makes writing C extensions for Python as easy as Python itself."

* Numba[3] "is an open source JIT compiler that translates a subset of Python and NumPy code into fast machine code."

* Pyston[4] "is a performance-optimizing JIT for Python, and is drop-in compatible with ... CPython 3.8.12"

[0] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

[1] https://www.pypy.org/

[2] https://cython.org/

[3] https://numba.pydata.org/

[4] https://github.com/pyston/pyston

For the benefit of future readers: https://numba.pydata.org/

Taichi (similar to numba) is a python library that allows you to write high speed code within python. So your program consists of slow python that gets interpreted regularly, and fast python (fully type annotated and restricted to a subset of the language) that gets parallellized and jitted for CPU or GPU. And you can mix the two within the same source file.

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.

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...

The design of MLX is inspired by frameworks like NumPy, PyTorch, Jax, and ArrayFire.

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

>

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

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!

For a similar "benchmark" (also Mandelbrot) but took place in Jax repo discussion: https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/11078#discussionco...

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 *

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!