Rust on Strathweb. A free flowing tech monologue.

Strathweb Phi Engine - now with Phi-4 support

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 07:06:14 +0000

Last summer, I launched Strathweb Phi Engine — a cross-platform library for running Phi model inference via a simple, high-level API, from a number of high-level languages: C#, Swift, Kotlin and Python.

Today I am happy to announce support for Phi-4, the latest model in the Phi family, which Microsoft AI released in December 2024.

Strathweb Phi Engine - now with Safe Tensors support

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 07:06:14 +0000

This summer, I announced the Strathweb Phi Engine — a cross-platform library for running Phi inference anywhere. Up until now, the library only supported models in the quantized GGUF format. Today, I’m excited to share that the library now also supports the Safe Tensor model format.

This enhancement significantly expands the scope of use cases and interoperability for the Strathweb Phi Engine. With Safe Tensor support, you can now load and execute models in a format that is not only performant but also prioritizes security and memory safety. Notably, all the Phi models published by Microsoft use the Safe Tensor format by default.

Announcing Strathweb Phi Engine - a cross-platform library for running Phi-3 anywhere

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 04:06:14 +0000

I recently wrote a blog post about using Rust to run Phi-3 model on iOS. The post received an overwhelmingly positive response, and I got a lot of questions about running Phi-3 using similar approach on other platforms, such as Android, Windows, macOS or Linux. Today, I’m excited to announce the project I have been working on recently - Strathweb Phi Engine, a cross-platform library for running Phi-3 (almost) anywhere.

Running Microsoft's Phi-3 Model in an iOS app with Rust

Thu, 09 May 2024 07:06:14 +0000

Last month, Microsoft released the exciting new minimal AI model, Phi-3 mini. It’s a 3.8B model that can outperform many other larger models, while still being small enough to run on a phone. In this post, we’ll explore how to run the Phi-3 model inside a SwiftUI iOS application using the minimalist ML framework for Rust, called candle, and built by the nice folks at HuggingFace.

Calling Rust code from Swift on iOS and macOS

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 08:00:14 +0000

In the last post we covered how UniFFI can be used to elegantly create C bindings and generate bridge C# code that allows for calling native code written in Rust from a C# program. Today, we are going to build upon that, and we will show - in a true cross platform fashion - how the same core Rust library we used last time around, and the same toolchain that we have already set up, can be used to generate similar bindings for Swift. This will enable us to reuse our native Rust code in an iOS or macOS application.

Calling Rust code from C#

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:00:14 +0000

There are plenty of reasons to be excited about Rust. Rust provides cross-platform compatibility and can compile to nearly any platform, including Windows, iOS, Android, and many more. One of Rust’s core features is its focus on memory safety. It accomplishes this through its ownership model, which helps prevent common bugs such as null pointer dereferencing, dangling pointers, and data races.

All of this makes Rust an excellent alternative to C++/C for implementing shared logic and algorithms, spanning many different platforms.

In this post we shall see how we can integrate Rust into program written in C# - and how a native library built with Rust can be called into from a .NET application.