Today, we concluded the Owl Project, a scientific computing project originated from Computer Lab at Cambridge University eight years ago. It was a difficult but inevitable decision. Despite this challenging decision, we remain incredibly proud of our achievements over this nearly eight-year journey and are grateful to everyone who supported us. Please refer to the Linkedin post for full notice.
Hey everyone! Just wanted to share a little experiment I've been working on - it's called the English Wikipedia Vector Database API, now up on RapidAPI. It's a nifty tool designed to make it super easy for anyone dabbling in AI to pull in Wikipedia content without the usual headaches of text processing and vector conversion. It's pretty straightforward: you send a text embedding, and it finds similar Wikipedia articles. Full disclosure, this is still in the experimental phase, so please bear with me if there are any performance hiccups. Would love for you to try it out and share any feedback. Happy hacking!
A large part of benefits originate from OCaml language per se IMO. Owl inherits these advantages for free. E.g., taking advantage of various compiler backends so you can (almost) use the same code for both web backend and frontend if you are a full-stack developer.
From numerical lib designers' perspective, a holistic design (note which does not necessarily mean a monolithic lib) leads to a more coherent and consistent design (e.g. APIs), which makes a large software system easier to optimise and maintain. As a young and experimental system, Owl seems doing a quite decent job so far IMO.
However, from a (broad) users' perspective, being very honest, I never believe which one should replace which despite how much I love Owl myself. Each tool has own pros and cons deeply root in its internal design, depends on the language it uses, its design assumptions and goals. I think the choice of tools is really a matter of project requirements, coders' own skill, personal taste, management choice, as well as the context (i.e. what kind of apps you are going to build for whom and where).
