alt Hacker NewsI have a Mac with 4TB of storage but it’s still annoying when every new AI app I try installs its own virtual environment with a fresh copy of Python, PyTorch, other duplicate libraries, and then models on top of that.
Replies
I have a couple small apps that have a (non-LLM) model, and originally the models and code were in PyTorch, built by Python devs.
The original plan was to ship Python. However I found out I can migrate them to CoreML, and now it's a model file + Swift code. I got some massive performance improvements as well.
Of course, this doesn't work at all for non-Mac environments, but it was nice to be able to do it. (Also doesn't solve the duplicate large models problem)
It’d be nice if there was a standard like ~/.local/llm/hugging-face-name.gguf or something.
Python heaviness is a more fundamental problem.
If you use uv, python apps use a shared cache which helps a lot.
As an occasional python user I'm always amazed and frustrated that it seems that the only way to be able to use/build anything is to create a whole separate environment.
And now given everybody now does this I guess the incentive to stop breaking stuff reduces even further.
Might as well have static binaries.