Move Experimental to TorchAO prototype

[drisspg]

Summary

The naming / project structure is confusing I think we should move this project to Prototype folder

[drisspg]

cc @kimishpatel @metascroy @msaroufim

[msaroufim]

I'd argue for the stronger claim of promoting the work out of experimental

[kimishpatel]

@msaroufim I think cpu related work is something we are already talking about moving out of experimental.

@drisspg no specific objection of experimental vs prototype. Just curious on your motivation

[drisspg]

I was taking a look at the repo structure of torchao and I think the experimental naming and location is quite confusing.

We just did some house keeping and I think that any effort to clean up the codebase is valuable

[vkuzo]

I'd argue for the stronger claim of promoting the work out of experimental

Agreed, but IMO let's move out of experimental first (fast, one PR), and figure out how to graduate later (larger effort).

no specific objection of experimental vs prototype. Just curious on your motivation

We should be consistent throughout the repo to minimize confusion, the prototype folder is where all the other similar projects live.

@kimishpatel could you help find someone to actually do this soon?

[kimishpatel]

I'd argue for the stronger claim of promoting the work out of experimental

Agreed, but IMO let's move out of experimental first (fast, one PR), and figure out how to graduate later (larger effort).

no specific objection of experimental vs prototype. Just curious on your motivation

We should be consistent throughout the repo to minimize confusion, the prototype folder is where all the other similar projects live.

@kimishpatel could you help find someone to actually do this soon?

Yeah at the time of introducing experimental folder, prototype one had some different semantics. If we agree that both are the same. i am ok to do the move. I have some code in pipe though that i would like to land before I can get @metascroy or someone to help

[metascroy]

A couple things:

• On promoting experimental out of experimental, I'd like to start with the experimental/quant_apis this half. There is a larger discussion around libtorch-agnostic that I'd like to settle before committing doing this with the C++ code. cc @msaroufim

• On moving experimental to prototype: I think this makes sense. I do have a somewhat large diff stack that I'd like to land to experimental before migrating, though. cc @drisspg @vkuzo

[vkuzo]

sgtm!

[vkuzo]

Yeah at the time of introducing experimental folder, prototype one had some different semantics.

@kimishpatel , wondering if you can share some context? I honestly never understood why the code was added to torchao/experimental instead of something like torchao/prototype/some_name_related_to_edge_devices

[metascroy]

A couple things:

• On promoting experimental out of experimental, I'd like to start with the experimental/quant_apis this half. There is a larger discussion around libtorch-agnostic that I'd like to settle before committing doing this with the C++ code. cc @msaroufim
• On moving experimental to prototype: I think this makes sense. I do have a somewhat large diff stack that I'd like to land to experimental before migrating, though. cc @drisspg @vkuzo

On more thing to add: I don't know how smooth the migration from experimental to prototype will be. It will require updating a lot of C++ include paths, and it might break internal tests because I don't think prototype is mirrored in xplat like experimental is.

[kimishpatel]

Yeah at the time of introducing experimental folder, prototype one had some different semantics.

@kimishpatel , wondering if you can share some context? I honestly never understood why the code was added to torchao/experimental instead of something like torchao/prototype/some_name_related_to_edge_devices

@vkuzo I dont remember all the context, but it was more of "experimental" was something no one else landed their stuff except us. And maybe that was the reason to avoid contamination. I dont think it was anything beyond that.