A while ago, a friend pointed me to the reasoned discussion at Google of their decision to switch development of their TensorFlow machine-learning library from Python (with C++ and CUDA) to Swift. The justification has date “April 2018”.
I remember thinking at the time that an important part of the decision was that many of the engineers knew Swift. And that that probably wasn’t going to be true for engineers outside that team.
Today I found that Google has already abandoned the Swift TenrsorFlow project. An article in InfoWorld dates the shutdown to around February 2021, and that is also the date of the last commit to the Github repository linked above. The Github code-frequency plot suggests that the project was more or less dormant from April 2020.
I found this interesting only because I was surprised that Google would be quick to abandon a decision that they appear to have taken carefully.
Maybe related, StackOverflow trends shows Tensorflow discussion plateaued around the beginning of 2018, dropped in late 2019 and early 2020, and then started rising again from mid-2021. Meanwhile the other standard machine-learning library, PyTorch, has seen a linear rise since its release in late 2016.
