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Regardless of what glue language you use to write ML stuff, if you follow it down to its core, most of it is going to use a BLAS library to do matrix multiplication. That's where the heavy lifting is. And BLAS libraries are in C/C++ or Fortran. For example, OpenBLAS or Intel MKL.


BLAS Level 1 was released in 1979, thirty seven years ago.

There was no other comparable language to implement it in besides Fortran. C was a newcomer at the time, like Rust currently is.

The amount of optimization and edge-case handling work that went into BLAS since then is enormous.

BTW, Fortran, being mostly aliasing-free, is a safer language than C, and more optimizaton-friendly.


I thought Fortran's aliasing-free rule was just an assumption of the compiler, not something that it actually enforced.. so you could very easily write code that contained aliasing bugs.




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