Current status of leaf?

[anp]

From this post:

Which is why Max and I will suspend the development of Leaf and focus on new ventures.

Is this accurate? If so, should the README mention so?

Autumn is also still listed on http://rust-lang.org/friends.html, is Autumn still a thing? If so, will the company continue to use Rust?

[MichaelHirn]

Hi @dikaiosune,

We are procrastinating really hard on updating the README, although we should because Autumn is in the process of shutting down.

Also, no one stepped up to take over Leaf which means Leaf is rather dead at the moment, too.

[secunit64]

@MichaelHirn I can make an effort to take over leaf, and it's associated libraries. But I will be needing a lot of help and assistance in assimilating the code. I believe there is a lot of value in collenchyma framework - especially in building robust code for large scale data visualization and analysis pipelines.

[kination]

I also agree with @vyslexic too. Still lot of people are interested on leaf, and it seems bad idea to close it. Instead of shutting down, how about take over to someone else who wants too?

[KodrAus]

@vyslexic I'm a hobbyist with an expensive graphics card, so don't have a lot of GPU experience but would be happy to step up and help if someone with more experience took it on too.

I was working through the documentation book when Autumn wound down.

[secunit64]

@MichaelHirn , @hobofan - I am happy to carry forward your work with autumnai. How would you guys like to proceed ? You can either add me to the autumnai org or I can start maintaining a mirror.

@KodrAus, @djKooks - we can use all the help we can to develop the community and the software.

[kination]

@vyslexic good to hear that! Please share the progress of carrying it on.

[hobofan]

Hey everyone, @MichaelHirn and me wanted to write down a well formulated statement, but I never seem to find the time for it, so I'll just write out right now what we decided on:

We both don't feel comfortable handing over the maintainership over Leaf's and the other Autumn repositories to a maintainer we don't know well, and also don't have the time to vet one. Another motivation for that is, that both Leaf and Collenchyma can develop into very different directions from here on, and we don't want to endorse one over the other. If the projects would have had more time to mature and grow a healthy community around them, that would probably be a different story, but that's not the situation we are in right now.

So we feel that the best way moving forward to ensure that the code we built continues to provide value, and that you, the community can start to build a healthy project is for anyone wanting to continue with the project to do a hard fork.

Feel free to discuss forming a hard fork and linking them in the issues of the relevant repositories. We will try our best to make them easy to find by linking them in the READMEs, so that anyone wanting to contribute can find the new projects.

[MichaelHirn]

Thanks, @hobofan.

I agree, but am open to being convinced otherwise. If taking over Autumn instead of forking it, is more relevant to your plans, @vyslexic, I'm happy to do a 15 min call in the next few days. (Max, happy to have you on the call if you want to.)

[kination]

Thanks to @MichaelHirn, @hobofan . @vyslexic please share us the result about it. Lots of people are interested on it.

[secunit64]

@djKooks - my apologies for intermittent responses. It has been a busy last few days.
@hobofan, @MichaelHirn - thanks for clarifying the recommended approach moving forward. I understand your concerns, and fully respect them. My intention wasn't to "take over" as maintainer, but to merely be added as a contributor to the group, so I can take an active role in handling issues, and arbitrating pull requests etc. I am content with working on a fork as well.

Explaining the motivation and plans behind my interest in leaf/collenchyma will require a long blog post, and I hope to get there some day (soonish!). But briefly - my background and contributions in the past few years (~8yrs) has been in the area of high performance visualization, in-situ analytics, and data mining for large scale (~petabytes) scientific (HPC) applications. A recurring frustration that I often encounter is the lack of robust, scalable, fault-tolerant software (for analytics and visualization) that "just works" on large scale HPC systems.

The "state-of-the-art" software libraries such as Paraview, VTK are around ~20 years old, and do not support the computing paradigms (both hardware and software) that are evolving (hybrid architectures, fine-grained concurrency, deep learning etc). Solutions like Hadoop and Spark may be engineered but do not map very well to the problem domains we are looking into (more on this on my yet-to-come blog).

This is where I believe leaf/collenchyma can really add value. First, they are based on Rust, and therefore inherit all the guarantees that come with the language. Second, a library such as leaf/collenchyma can be combined with a fault-tolerant, soft real-time system (erlang, elixir) to provide a data analysis/machine intelligence/visualization framework with the following benefits:

• A highly-available run-time system that is
• Massively scalable on-demand,
• Is fault-tolerant and "self-reparing" to some extent,
• and can scale-up and scale-out, effectively at minimal development cost.

This is a long-term goal, of course, and I would hope to achieve this with the help of many other contributors that have expressed interest here, and elsewhere in my community.
I hope this answers a few questions you may have had. I come from a C/C++ family of languages, so I would say I am an intermediate Rust programmer. It will still take me a while to get up-to-speed with the Rust code in these repositories.

Happy to chat more on Slack/Skype/Hangout if needed ...

[MichaelHirn]

Thank you, @vyslexic. I am looking forward to the blog post, to learn more about it - sounds very cool.

I think (@hobofan, let me know if you disagree), that it would be best, given your objections, that to me, seem more complementary to Rust/Leaf/Collenchyma's general environment than to Leaf/Collenchyma-the library and the initial goals that we had, to start a fork and see from there.

[neverfox]

Also interested and would like to join in on any discussions.

[sunface]

Also interested and would like to join in on any discussions.

[kination]

@vyslexic do you have some next plan or schedule? It would be helpful to people who wants to support the project.

[dlight]

Just a thought: perhaps a software foundation like the Apache foundation could accept this project under their umbrella?