@tmaila and @elizarov - thanks for getting those points together!
I’d be interested to hear yours and everyone’s opinion on this. And can talk directly too.
Tensorflow and most other “Python” deep learning frameworks are actually written in C++. Python is used just as a scripting language to “glue” various moving pieces together. Any other scripting language could be used instead, with the corresponding (relatively thin) bridge. Of course, the current momentum is on the Python side.
If tensorflow and many other “Python” DL/AI frameworks are written in C/C++ and Python is just the most popular wrapper right now, what stops us from:
- Writing Kotlin wrappers instead for those C libs as is.
- If/when helpful - consider and gradually convert C libs to pure java/kotlin as things move forward, and as other comments here also mention, often C impl is faster than JVM for specialized cases, which also has disadvantages we can avoid.
- That means no Python in the loop at all is possible.
- jython (or other python full support bridging) or is less attractive as it’s an additional layer, but could be helpful to get things working soon and support all of python’s echosystem at once.
Would those be helpful for strengthening Kotlin in the AI/DL community?