social.noyu.me

god… MLIR is so cool. i love this IR. it can do so much. it's like “yo dawg i heard u liked IRs so i put an IR in your IR so you can compile while you compile” and this is what makes it awesome

@hikari It has some very cool ideas. However, as someone who tried to use it without LLVM (StableHLO for model serialization), I think a lot of it is in practice seriously underspecified.

Especially the bitcode format which only has very incomplete and outdated documentation, but also some operations are not documented at all.

ONNX has its disadvantages and missing features, but I actually like how well documented and standardized the parsing is, while providing a similar programming model.

@hikari That of course assumes ML usecases. MLIR is more general though I'm not sure I've seen anybody use it for something else?

@bas i'd really like to try using it for non-ML stuff! i kinda dismissed it out of hand the first time i saw it because i wasn't interested in ML stuff at the time, but having learned a bit more about it now, i can appreciate how it might have general applications.

re: bitcode, i'm not surprised, the llvm bitcode is also allegedly a nightmare

@hikari yeah, given it's primary usage seems to be machine learning, it is surprising to learn it stand for multi-level IR 🙃