Taichi Blogs

Python has become the most popular language in many rapidly evolving sectors, such as deep learning and data sciences. Yet its easy readability comes at the cost of performance. Of course, we all complain about program performance from time to time, and Python should certainly not take all the blame. Still, it's fair to say that Python's nature as an interpreted language does not help, especially in computation-intensive scenarios (e.g., when there are multiple nested for loops).

In the previous blog post, we mentioned this sentence, which is a part of the zen of Python. In this post, we will show you how we simplified the code of Taichi.

Imagine you'd like to write a new particle-based fluid algorithm. You started simple, didn't spend much time before finding a reference C++/CUDA work online (or derived the work from your labmate, unfortunately). cmake .. && make, you typed. Oops, cmake threw out an error due to a random incompatible third party library. Installed and rebuilt, now it passed. Then you ran it, which immediately segfaulted (without any stacktrace, of course). Then you started gazing at the code, placed the necessary asset files at the right place, fixed a few dangling pointers and reran. It... actually worked, until you plugged in your revised algorithm. Now another big fight with the GPU or CPU code. More often than not, you get lost in the language details.