Thank you @leandron @ekalda for the questions, and @zhiics, @slyubomirsky, @Hzfengsy, @sunggg for the discussion!
As a long-term contributor since 2018, the pre-Relay era, and the initiator and top 2 contributors of RAF ([https://github.com/awslabs/raf/](https://github.com/awslabs/raf/)), the TVM-based training framework, I would love to share my perspective and slight concern about the TVM development at this moment, 2022. While being a decent auto-tuner for static shape workloads, and the latest work with auto tensorization further boosted its performance with microkernel tuning, there has been strong demand from the community to allow TVM to do more, which as @YuchenJin listed, includes: - Unified abstraction - Dynamic shape support - Dataflow block and first-class side effect handling - Non-inference workloads As a community, we do encourage everyone to understand different perspectives and empower each other, and I believe this is the way for us to grow. Technically, just wanted to address a meta question here: why is it less feasible to gradually upgrade Relay? - Conflicted design philosophy: Relax follows a completely different design than Relay with mutually conflicting assumptions and ideas. For example, having two conflicting shape mechanisms in the system would effectively mean passes have to handle both of them. - Engineering challenge: design difference leads to hurdles for incremental updates. For example, if we want to move away from the assumption that the IR is side effect-free, all the passes with the old assumption become automatically invalid or wrong because the assumption is not respected. - Stability concern: Even if we do surgical incremental enhancement to Relay by introducing breaking changes piece by piece, there is still stability concern. Consider a case where there are downstream vendors whose forks depend on upstream Relay, and Relay’s assumptions break over time, it would be less stable for them to maintain Relay. Alternatively, we believe having Relax as a separate pass is a cleaner and more maintainable approach - gradually bringing some of the passes from the bottom is engineeringly incremental and guarantees that the Relay code path is always stable. -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/apache/tvm-rfcs/pull/89#issuecomment-1222788202 You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Message ID: <apache/tvm-rfcs/pull/89/c1222788...@github.com>
