Candle: A Minimalist ML Framework for Rust

Overview

Candle is a free and open-source machine learning (ML) framework designed specifically for Rust developers. With a focus on performance and ease of use, Candle supports GPU acceleration, making it an ideal choice for both beginners and experienced ML practitioners.

Preview

Candle offers various online demos showcasing its capabilities, including:

• YOLO: Pose estimation and object recognition
• Whisper: Speech recognition
• LLaMA2 & T5: Advanced text generation
• Segment Anything: Image segmentation

How to Use

Getting started with Candle is straightforward. After installing the candle-core, you can run a simple matrix multiplication with just a few lines of code. For example:

use candle_core::{Device, Tensor};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let device = Device::Cpu;
    let a = Tensor::randn(0f32, 1., (2, 3), &device)?;
    let b = Tensor::randn(0f32, 1., (3, 4), &device)?;
    let c = a.matmul(&b)?;
    println!("{c}");
    Ok(())
}

To utilize GPU support, simply change Device::Cpu to Device::new_cuda(0)?.

Purposes

Candle can be used for various ML tasks, including:

• Image recognition
• Speech processing
• Text generation
• Code completion

Reviews

Users appreciate Candle for its lightweight design and efficient performance, especially when utilizing GPU capabilities.

Alternatives

Some alternatives to Candle include TensorFlow,