Sad news about the Theano framework. Here is the announcement that some developers found in their mailbox two days ago.



Dear users and developers,

After almost ten years of development, we have the regret to announce that we will put an end to our Theano development after the 1.0 release, which is due in the next few weeks. We will continue minimal maintenance to keep it working for one year, but we will stop actively implementing new features. Theano will continue to be available afterwards, as per our engagement towards open source software, but MILA does not commit to spend time on maintenance or support after that time frame.

The software ecosystem supporting deep learning research has been evolving quickly, and has now reached a healthy state: open-source software is the norm; a variety of frameworks are available, satisfying needs spanning from exploring novel ideas to deploying them into production; and strong industrial players are backing different software stacks in a stimulating competition.

We are proud that most of the innovations Theano introduced across the years have now been adopted and perfected by other frameworks. Being able to express models as mathematical expressions, rewriting computation graphs for better performance and memory usage, transparent execution on GPU, higher-order automatic differentiation, for instance, have all become mainstream ideas.

In that context, we came to the conclusion that supporting Theano is no longer the best way we can enable the emergence and application of novel research ideas. Even with the increasing support of external contributions from industry and academia, maintaining an older code base and keeping up with competitors has come in the way of innovation.

MILA is still committed to supporting researchers and enabling the implementation and exploration of innovative (and sometimes wild) research ideas, and we will keep working towards this goal through other means, and making significant open source contributions to other projects.

Thanks to all of you who for helping develop Theano, and making it better by contributing bug reports, profiles, use cases, documentation, and support.

— Yoshua Bengio,

Head of MILA

Goodbye Theano! This was also re-posted here.

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