zerfoo

Zerfoo: A High-Performance, Scalable, and Idiomatic Go Framework for Machine Learning

Zerfoo is a machine learning framework built from the ground up in Go. It is designed for performance, scalability, and developer experience, enabling everything from practical deep learning tasks to large-scale AGI experimentation.

By leveraging Go's strengths—simplicity, strong typing, and best-in-class concurrency—Zerfoo provides a robust and maintainable foundation for building production-ready ML systems.

Status: Pre-release — actively in development.

Quick Start

Define, train, and run a simple model in just a few lines of idiomatic Go.

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"github.com/zerfoo/zerfoo/compute"
	"github.com/zerfoo/zerfoo/graph"
	"github.com/zerfoo/zerfoo/layers/activations"
	"github.com/zerfoo/zerfoo/layers/core"
	"github.com/zerfoo/zerfoo/tensor"
	"github.com/zerfoo/zerfoo/training"
)

func main() {
	// 1. Create a compute engine
	engine := compute.NewCPUEngine()

	// 2. Define the model architecture using a graph builder
	builder := graph.NewBuilder[float32](engine)
	input := builder.Input([]int{1, 10})
	dense1 := builder.AddNode(core.NewDense(10, 32), input)
	act1 := builder.AddNode(activations.NewReLU(), dense1)
	output := builder.AddNode(core.NewDense(32, 1), act1)

	// 3. Build the computational graph
	forward, backward, err := builder.Build(output)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	// 4. Create an optimizer
	optimizer := training.NewAdamOptimizer[float32](0.01)

	// 5. Generate dummy data
	inputTensor, _ := tensor.NewTensor(engine, []int{1, 10})
	targetTensor, _ := tensor.NewTensor(engine, []int{1, 1})

	// 6. Run the training loop
	for i := 0; i < 100; i++ {
		// Forward pass
		predTensor := forward(map[graph.NodeHandle]*tensor.Tensor[float32]{input: inputTensor})

		// Compute loss (dummy loss for this example)
		loss := predTensor.Data()[0] - targetTensor.Data()[0]
		grad := tensor.NewScalar(engine, 2*loss)

		// Backward pass to compute gradients
		backward(grad, map[graph.NodeHandle]*tensor.Tensor[float32]{input: inputTensor})

		// Update weights
		optimizer.Step(builder.Parameters())
	}

	fmt.Println("Training complete!")
}

Why Zerfoo?

Zerfoo is designed to address the limitations of existing ML frameworks by embracing Go's philosophy.

• ✅ Idiomatic and Simple: Build models using clean, readable Go. We favor composition over inheritance and explicit interfaces over magic.
• 🚀 High-Performance by Design: A static graph execution model, pluggable compute engines (CPU, GPU planned), and minimal Cgo overhead ensure your code runs fast.
• ⛓️ Robust and Type-Safe: Leverage Go's strong type system to catch errors at compile time, not runtime. Shape mismatches and configuration issues are caught before training even begins.
• 🌐 Scalable from the Start: With first-class support for distributed training, Zerfoo is architected to scale from a single laptop to massive compute clusters.
• 🧩 Modular and Extensible: A clean, layered architecture allows you to extend any part of the framework—from custom layers to new hardware backends—by implementing well-defined interfaces.

Core Features

• Declarative Graph Construction: Define models programmatically with a Builder API or declaratively using Go structs and tags.
• Static Execution Graph: The graph is built and validated once, resulting in error-free forward/backward passes and significant performance optimizations.
• Pluggable Compute Engines: A hardware abstraction layer allows Zerfoo to target different backends. The default is a pure Go engine, with BLAS and GPU (CUDA) engines planned.
• Automatic Differentiation: Gradients are computed efficiently using reverse-mode AD (backpropagation).
• First-Class Distributed Training: A DistributedStrategy interface abstracts away the complexity of multi-node training, with support for patterns like All-Reduce and Parameter Server.
• Multi-Precision Support: Native support for float32 and float64, with float16 and float8 for cutting-edge, low-precision training.
• ONNX Interoperability: Export models to the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format for deployment in any compatible environment.

Architectural Vision

Zerfoo is built on a clean, layered architecture that separates concerns, ensuring the framework is both powerful and maintainable. A core tenet of this architecture is the use of the Zerfoo Model Format (ZMF) as the universal intermediate representation for models. This enables a strict decoupling from model converters like zonnx, ensuring that zerfoo focuses solely on efficient model execution without any ONNX-specific dependencies.

1. Composition Layer: Define models as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of nodes (layers, activations). This layer is hardware-agnostic.
2. Execution Layer: A pluggable Engine performs the actual tensor computations on specific hardware (CPU, GPU). This allows the same model to run on different devices without code changes.

For a deep dive into the design philosophy, core interfaces, and technical roadmap, please read our Architectural Design Document.

Getting Started

This project is in a pre-release state. The API is not yet stable.

To install Zerfoo, use go get:

go get github.com/zerfoo/zerfoo

Contributing

Zerfoo is an ambitious project, and we welcome contributions from the community! Whether you're an expert in machine learning, compilers, or distributed systems, or a Go developer passionate about AI, there are many ways to get involved.

Please read our Architectural Design Document to understand the project's vision and technical foundations.

License

Zerfoo is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.