Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
It&#x27;s a shame. I had high hopes at the beginning that S4TF - and the investment in Swift from Google - would help Swift break out of the iOS ghetto and cement it as a mainstream language.<p>Swift&#x27;s a delightful language to use.  It has a lot of the nice things about Rust&#x27;s type system, but is a heck of a lot easier to use at the expense of a bit of performance.  For a lot of use cases, I think this is a great value proposition.  ML&#x2F;data science is a great example where practitioners could benefit from a more grown-up type system than what Python has on offer, but would still be able to keep low level details at arms length.<p>I think Serverless would be another ideal use-case for Swift, where the productivity, clarity and correctness tools it offers would be a huge benefit.<p>Some very interesting things came out of the S4TF project - like the work on autodiff, and python interop.  It&#x27;s a shame the project never really seemed to get legs, it seems like it just languished for years with no clear direction.<p>These days I do most of my work in Rust, and I&#x27;m happy to do so because the tooling, community, and ecosystem is really amazing.  But there are a lot of language concepts and features I miss from swift.  I guess it goes to show that the governance and availability of a language have a lot more to do with adoption than the merits of the language itself.