tract VS dfdx

Tract is the most well known ML crate in Rust, which I believe can compile to WASM - https://github.com/sonos/tract/. Burn may also be useful - https://github.com/burn-rs/burn.

tract!!

we use tract for inference, integrated into our runtime and services.

Not for training, but for inference this looks nice: https://github.com/sonos/tract

There's also tract, from sonos[0]. 100% rust.

I'm currently trying to use it to do speech recognition with a variant of the Conformer architecture (exported to ONNX).

The final goal is to do it in WASM client-side.

[0] https://github.com/sonos/tract

As the article notes, there isn't any official Rust-native support for any common frameworks.

tract (https://github.com/sonos/tract) seems like the most mature for ONNX (for which TF/PT export is good nowadays), and recently it successfully implemented BERT.

There are some DL libraries written in Rust: https://github.com/sonos/tract , https://docs.rs/neuronika/latest/neuronika/index.html . The second one could be used for training, I think.

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!