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TensorFlow 1.x vs 2.x. – summary of changes

In 2019, Google announced TensorFlow 2.0, it is a major leap from the existing TensorFlow 1.0. The key differences are as follows:

Ease of use: Many old libraries (example tf.contrib) were removed, and some consolidated. For example, in TensorFlow1.x the model could be made using Contrib, layers, Keras or estimators, so many options for the same task confused many new users. TensorFlow 2.0 promotes TensorFlow Keras for model experimentation and Estimators for scaled serving, and the two APIs are very convenient to use.

Eager Execution:  In TensorFlow 1.x. The writing of code was divided into two parts: building the computational graph and later creating a session to execute it. this was quite cumbersome, especially if in the big model that you have designed, a small error existed somewhere in the beginning. TensorFlow2.0 Eager Execution is implemented by default, i.e. you no longer need to create a session to run the computational graph,  you can see the result of your code directly without the need of creating Session.

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Model Building and deploying made easy:  With TensorFlow2.0 providing high level TensorFlow Keras API, the user has a greater flexibility in creating the model. One can define model using Keras functional or sequential API. The TensorFlow Estimator API allows one to run model on a local host or on a distributed multi-server environment without changing your model. Computational graphs are powerful in terms of performance, in TensorFlow 2.0 you can use the decorator tf.function so that the following function block is run as a single graph. This is done via the powerful Autograph feature of TensorFlow 2.0. This allows users to optimize the function and increase portability. And the best part you can write the function using natural Python syntax.

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