Comment · 1 month ago
Julia has had a great CUDA story for a few years now, and this about 9 days old. Rust rejects buffer aliasing at compile time using Rust's borrow checker, but shared memory in cuda-oxide currently requires unsafe, but then there's HuggingFace's Grout and mistral.rs, so yeah, Rust is picking up ground here on Julia. How is OpenCL's performance these days?
Comment · 1 month ago
I liked Julia the first time I tried it years ago. I had some Matlab experience, so it seemed a similar, yet great improvement (no cost! more modern, but lacking some key libs or toolkits). I started programming Commodore BASIC in 1977 on my PET 2001. Then 6502 Assembler/machine language, C, Turbo Pascal, and many more. I have recently gone back to assembler because of AI. I don't miss hand coding assembler or creating macros that don't exist in FASM, but AI allows me to prompt for a terse program, using tried and true asm methods, which I can then audit. Julia has great math and scientific libraries, so my asm stuff isn't in competition with my asm efforts, but I am really enjoying the asm/AI thing for now. Granted this is for my own small projects. Coding is not my main job. I use coding in my other jobs to help me with certain tasks like scheduling, simulations, engineering, and project management. I was playing with the Julia version of cadCAD that was on Python, however, Julia has a lot of other libs that are way better to do dynamic or complexity studies than cadCAD.
Comment · 1 month ago
If you run a model locally to work on your area of expertise in mathematics, and you make a discovery, haven't you stood on the shoulders of others that created that model you are using? Playing devil's advocate here, are we only in for human collaboration, but not machine contributions in this case? Scholars get cited, but do they normally get paid for others citing them and using their work to advance their own? I get the whole sneakiness about how these companies like OpenAI built their models upon IP and data without a clear trail of attribution or compensation where it would normally be present. I am not a proponent for either side at the moment. I am trying to grapple with this whole new world of shared knowledge and how it is produced and shared and profited from especially when there is a $1m prize to distribute!
Comment · 1 month ago
I've been on this horse for a while now. I've settled on learning Ada/SPARK. Ada 2022 will start feeding a new SPARK 2014 update. Yes, they are both verbose, if you don't like that sort of thing, and don't like Pascal-like syntax. Believe me, I like APL/J/k/uiua/BQN and Forth and ASM. I am usually syntax agnostic as long as the PL and the ecosystem (more important than most think), meet your needs. I tried Rust back in 2018, and then again in 2023, but found it very complex and Ok, not a fan of the syntax. I would have preferred more ML or Haskell-like syntax. Zig seemed nice, but different use case, and too new. After all, Ada/SPARK have been on huge, high-assurance, high-safety applications for decades. Rust is getting some of their love, and vice versa. AdaCore had created a verified Rust compiler, but with a real world product (Blacktail hoist) in the works, we need a toolset and guarantees and ease of auditing and acceptance to achieve high safety and standards certifications. Think aerospace, defense, railway, and automotive. I started programming in 1977, so there's always a place in my heart for ASM/C. I played with F#, F*, and LOW from MS, and they are good, but they and Rust simply don't have the real world legacy of Ada/SPARK. I have been using Shen to write some formally verified models of less safety-critical areas of our software and I find it refreshing, however, my day job is to stay focused on Ada/SPARK until Rust matures more with a formally verifed proven toolset. There are certainly efforts and crates available in that direction, so hopefully others will bring it to where it needs to be. Lean is another one I have been playing with for some of the more overall logic proof of the system we are building.