Comment by vintagedave
5 days ago
I really empathised with this part:
> Codebase Divergence: Our engine is based on an early fork of vLLM from over a year ago. Although structurally similar, we’ve heavily customized it for DeepSeek models, making it difficult to extend for broader use cases.
I've been there. Probably a few of us have.
Their approach of working on splitting out maintainable sublibraries and sharing info directly even if not integrated seems a really nice way of working with the community -- ie, they have obstacles, but they're not letting the obstacles cause them to take the easy route of not contributing at all. And while it might seem better to someone wanting to use their techniques to share only working code, not info on the techniques, at least it's still knowledge sharing. And again I think it'd be easier for them not to do it. So kudos to them.
Non-runnable code can be really useful. I often wish it was available for some papers even if I never run it just to check what they actually did, because text and equations are often not specific enough.
They customized and optimized vLLM for their use case, so much that it became a different product (e.g. Debian vs Ubuntu).
The fact they share back some of their improvements is great.