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Comment by singularity2001 | Hacker News Reader

singularity2001

Anyone else disgusted by Apples APIs?

func BNNSFilterCreateConvolutionLayer(UnsafePointer<BNNSImageStackDescriptor>, UnsafePointer<BNNSImageStackDescriptor>, UnsafePointer<BNNSConvolutionLayerParameters>, UnsafePointer<BNNSFilterParameters>?) Returns a convolution filter, initialized with input, output, layer, and filter parameters.

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Accelerate is a low level C framework that is not representative of all Apple APIs. It's only used directly for very specific use cases. Most of the time you'll be creating neural nets with CoreML which is built on Accelerate and has a much friendlier and higher level API.

That function sure is ugly, but in general they have done a great job in making their own APIs more easy on the eyes.

And even that monstrosity doesn't look that bad in actual use:

  let filter = BNNSFilterCreateConvolutionLayer(&inDesc, &outDesc, &layerParams, &filterParams)

The worst offenders for readability are these C-ish functions that deal with unsafe pointers. But at least in Swift, I appreciate the safety brought by the type checking. It's quite nice that unsafe code is clearly marked.

> The worst offenders for readability are these C-ish functions that deal with unsafe pointers.

That is exactly the point, to make it pretty clear that the code needs to be scrutinized very carefully for its safety.

I love the higher level APIs

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