Re:Why Swift for TensorFlow?
by dynamicwebpaige on Sunday February 10, 2019 @04:52PM
(#19130304)
Yes! Swift is supported in Google Colab, and as a Jupyter kernel: https://github.com/google/swift-jupyter.
What is the plotting experience like though? As I previously mentioned, plotting is one of the main reasons our group uses python.
Another reason now that I think about it, is the number of scientific libraries that I can just "pip install" without much thought (such as scipy/opencv).
You can call out to matplotlib (or any other python libraries installed on your system), using the python interop feature (https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/master/docs/PythonI...)!
https://github.com/google/swift-jupyter#rich-output has an example with screenshots.
Oof
I ask this because the number 1 reason my deep learning research group chose python was because of the extensive and interactive scientific plotting ability that's built into python jupyter notebooks. While our volume of analysis isn't on the scale of say a google/fb (primarily biomedical image analysis), the ability to easily visually debug the results is much more important for developing robust models.