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Comment by DrNosferatu | Hacker News Reader

What fraction of the total is TensorFlow related code?

There is a section on the page that tells you (near the bottom): 16% of all uncompressed data in PyPI is from the Tensorflow project.

What the? 16%? Of the Python ecosystem. Why is it so big?

You can go check out the page linked in the post to see? That’s kind of why it exists!

Spoiler: the answer is nightly builds, huge binaries and a lot of wheels per release.

I was asking more on the level of: why do they do nightly builds of huge binaries and wheels when similar frameworks are not?

Have you tried building Tensorflow?

I tried on release day. Managed to break my entire Linux system. That was an annoying day.

And pip install some tensor flow nonsense has broken my projects many, many times. At this point I try really hard to ever avoid depending on anything in that ecosystem.

Is there something about Bazel's design choices that makes it so complicated? I felt like an idiot when I tried to build some old version of TensorFlow with some old non-default flag. I found even learning CMake easier.

TF also stands for TensorFlow, right? So I would say a even larger fraction.

It does, but that’s accounted for in the chart (tensorflow- and tf- prefixes). That will include other projects, but it doesn’t significantly contribute to the overall % as they are dwarfed by the official projects.

Good eye!

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