Born ML Framework - Development Roadmap

August 4, 2026 · View on GitHub

Mission: De-facto standard ML framework for Go — training and inference in a single binary Architecture: Burn-inspired (Rust), Go-idiomatic API Philosophy: Correctness → Performance → Scale

Last Updated: 2026-08-04 | Current Version: v0.9.23 | Go: 1.26+ | Strategy: Core → GPU → Models → Performance → Scale → Production → v1.0 LTS


🎯 Vision

Born = de-facto standard ML for Go ecosystem. Any Go service adds ML via go get github.com/born-ml/born — training and inference in the same binary, same toolchain, zero external dependencies.

Not a PyTorch replacement (different niche). Not an academic tool (production-first). Born is what database/sql is for databases: the standard Go-native interface for ML.

Why Born

  • One stack: train and deploy in Go, no Python sidecar, no FFI
  • One binary: go build → GPU-ready binary, no Docker, no CUDA install
  • One language: research experiments and production code share the same codebase
  • Type-safe: Tensor[float32, *webgpu.Backend] — errors at compile-time, not runtime

What Born Does Today (v0.9.22)

  • ✅ Train models from scratch on CPU and GPU (HRM model validated)
  • ✅ LLaMA inference from GGUF files (TinyLlama 1.1B verified); GGUF-embedded tokenizer
  • ✅ ONNX import (57 operators); SafeTensors with F16/BF16 widening
  • ✅ GPU acceleration: WebGPU/Vulkan via gogpu/wgpu (pure Go, zero CGO)
  • ✅ AVX2 SIMD, cache-tiled MatMul, parallel BatchMatMul
  • ✅ GPU batched dispatch (50→1 submits per forward pass)
  • ✅ Autodiff: all backward ops via forward composition (Burn pattern)
  • ✅ Backend-agnostic core: zero platform tags in tensor package (ADR-019)

🚀 Version Strategy

Philosophy: Validate → Iterate → Stabilize → LTS

v0.1.0 (INITIAL RELEASE) ✅ RELEASED (2025-11-17)
       ↓ (GPU backend development)
v0.2.0 (WebGPU GPU Backend) ✅ RELEASED (2025-11-28)
       ↓ (transformer primitives)
v0.3.0 (Transformer Primitives) ✅ RELEASED (2025-11-30)
       ↓ (attention layers)
v0.4.0 (Attention Mechanisms) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-01)
       ↓ (LLM support)
v0.5.0 (LLM Support) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-01)
       ↓ (model serialization)
v0.5.4 (Model Serialization) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-03)
       ↓ (WebGPU performance)
v0.5.5 (WebGPU Performance) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-03)
       ↓ (ONNX import + lazy GPU)
v0.6.0 (ONNX Import + Lazy GPU Mode) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-04)
       ↓ (inference optimization)
v0.7.0 (Flash Attention, Speculative Decoding, GGUF) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-10)
       ↓ (code quality)
v0.7.1 (Code Quality - Burn Patterns) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-16)
       ↓ (dependency updates)
v0.7.3 (Dependencies Update) ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-27)
       ↓ (ARM64 enhancements, Linear bias option, API improvements, gogpu integration)
v0.7.8 (GoGPU Ecosystem Integration Phase 1) ✅ RELEASED (2026-01-29)
       ↓ (dependency updates)
v0.7.10 (ARM64 Callback Fix) ✅ RELEASED (2026-02-18)
       ↓ (callback reliability)
v0.7.11 (Crosscall2 Callback Integration) ✅ RELEASED (2026-02-27)
       ↓ (FFI hardening)
v0.7.12 (FFI Hardening & Library Loading) ✅ RELEASED (2026-02-27)
       ↓ (ABI compliance fixes)
v0.7.13 (ABI Compliance Fixes) ✅ RELEASED (2026-03-02)
       ↓ (first community contribution)
v0.7.14 (ONNX Equal — Community PR) ✅ RELEASED (2026-03-04)
       ↓ (erf operator — community contribution)
v0.7.15 (Erf Operator — Community PR) ✅ RELEASED (2026-04-07)
       ↓ (community contributions, bugfixes, ONNX ops)
v0.7.16 (Community PRs, ONNX 49 ops, Bugfixes) ✅ RELEASED (2026-04-10)
       ↓ (WebGPU migration to pure Go)
v0.8.0 (GoGPU/wgpu Migration — Pure Go, Zero CGO) ✅ RELEASED (2026-04-26)
       ↓ (LLaMA inference, GGUF loading, reproducibility)
v0.8.1 (LLaMA Inference, GGUF Model Loading) ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-15)
       ↓ (tokenizer bug fix)
v0.8.2 (Tokenizer Fix, Backward Ops Migration, Scalar Gradient Fix) ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-16)
       ↓ (GPU scatter-add shaders)
v0.8.3 (GPU SelectAdd/ScatterAdd Shaders) ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-16)
       ↓ (CPU parallel + GPU batching + SIMD)
v0.9.0 (CPU Parallel, GPU Batching, AVX2 SIMD) ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-17)
       ↓ (distributed multi-GPU)
v0.10.0 (Distributed Multi-GPU, Data Parallelism) → Q3 2026
       ↓ (quantization, production serving)
v0.11.0 (Quantization, INT8/GPTQ, Model Zoo) → Q4 2026
       ↓ (multi-node, production serving)
v0.12.0 (Multi-Node, PD-Disaggregation, Production Serving) → Q1 2027
       ↓ (API stabilization)
v1.0.0 LTS → API freeze, stability guarantees

Critical Milestones

v0.1.0 = Initial Release with Core Features ✅ RELEASED

  • Tensor API with type safety
  • Tape-based autodiff
  • NN modules: Linear, Conv2D, MaxPool2D
  • Optimizers: SGD, Adam
  • CPU backend (im2col convolutions)
  • Validated: MNIST MLP 97.44%, CNN 98.18%

v0.2.0 = WebGPU GPU Backend ✅ RELEASED

  • Zero-CGO GPU acceleration (originally via go-webgpu, migrated to gogpu/wgpu in v0.8.0)
  • GPU operations: MatMul, Add, Sub, Mul, Div, Transpose
  • Activations: ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, Softmax
  • Buffer pool for memory efficiency
  • Performance: 123x MatMul speedup, 10.9x inference speedup
  • Windows support (Linux/macOS planned for v0.5.0)

v0.3.0 = Transformer Primitives + Public API ✅ RELEASED

  • Math ops: Exp, Sqrt, Rsqrt, Cos, Sin, Log
  • Reductions: SumDim, MeanDim (with keepDim), Sum, Argmax
  • Manipulation: Cat, Chunk, Unsqueeze, Squeeze, Expand
  • Indexing: Gather, Where
  • Layers: SiLU, RMSNorm, Embedding, Softmax
  • Gradient control: NoGrad, Detach
  • 31 public API operations: MulScalar, Greater/Gt, Int32, etc.
  • Enables: LLaMA, Mistral, GPT, HRM architectures

v0.4.0 = Attention Mechanisms ✅ RELEASED

  • Multi-Head Attention (MHA) with Q, K, V projections
  • Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)
  • KV-Cache for efficient inference (3.94x speedup)
  • Layer Normalization variants
  • Positional Encodings: RoPE, ALiBi, Sinusoidal, Learned
  • Transformer Block with FFN
  • BatchMatMul for 3D/4D tensors

v0.5.0 = LLM Support ✅ RELEASED

  • Grouped Query Attention (GQA) - LLaMA 2/3, Mistral
  • SwiGLU FFN with GLU variants (GeGLU, ReGLU)
  • GGUF Model Loader (v3 format)
  • Tokenizers: TikToken, BPE, HuggingFace
  • Sampling: Temperature, Top-K, Top-P, Min-P, Repetition Penalty
  • TextGenerator with streaming API
  • Production-ready LLM inference pipeline

v0.5.4 = Model Serialization ✅ RELEASED

  • Born Native Format v2 (.born) with SHA-256 checksum
  • Security validation (offset overlap, bounds check)
  • Memory-mapped reader for 70GB+ models
  • Checkpoint API for training resume
  • SafeTensors export for HuggingFace

v0.5.5 = WebGPU Performance ✅ RELEASED

  • Multi-dimensional Transpose on GPU (3D/4D/5D/6D)
  • Expand (broadcasting) on GPU
  • ~60x speedup for attention operations
  • Eliminated CPU fallback for transformer training

v0.6.0 = ONNX Import + Lazy GPU Mode ✅ RELEASED

  • ONNX model import (parser, loader, 30+ operators)
  • Lazy GPU evaluation (GPU-resident tensors)
  • Command batching (~90s → <5s/step for training)
  • GPU-to-GPU copy (no CPU round-trips)
  • GPU memory management (automatic cleanup)
  • 50+ raw tensor operations

v0.7.0 = Inference Optimization ✅ RELEASED

  • Flash Attention 2 (O(N) memory, 2x+ speedup, 128K+ context)
  • Speculative Decoding (2-4x inference speedup)
  • GGUF Import (llama.cpp ecosystem, K-quant dequantization)
  • WebGPU WGSL Flash Attention shader
  • Online softmax for numerical stability

v0.7.1 = Code Quality Refactoring ✅ CURRENT

  • Burn framework patterns applied (Issue #14)
  • Flash Attention CPU complexity: 111 → <30
  • Pre-slice bounds elimination
  • Stride specialization for auto-vectorization
  • New internal/parallel package
  • Extended Backend interface with backward methods

v0.8.0 = GoGPU/wgpu Migration ✅ RELEASED (2026-04-26)

  • WebGPU backend migrated from go-webgpu (Rust FFI) to gogpu/wgpu (pure Go)
  • Zero CGO, zero runtime deps — go build produces GPU-ready binary
  • Vulkan primary compute backend

v0.8.1 = LLaMA Inference & GGUF Loading ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-15)

  • models/llama: Full LLaMA model (GQA, RoPE, SwiGLU FFN, KV cache)
  • loader: Public GGUF/SafeTensors loading API
  • LoadGGUF: Auto-dequantize Q4_K, Q5_K, Q6_K, Q8_0, F16, F32
  • Injectable attention (WithAttentionFunc) for research experiments
  • nn.SetSeed() for reproducible weight initialization
  • Tested: TinyLlama 1.1B Q8_0 — "Paris" top-1 for "The capital of France is"
  • Fixed: RoPE rotate-half, GGML naming, Q4_K/Q5_K scales, F16 subnormals, tied embeddings

v0.8.2 = Tokenizer Fix + Backward Ops Migration ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-16)

  • Fixed: HF tokenizer normalizer (SentencePiece Prepend+Replace). PPL 1887 → 230.
  • Fixed: Scalar ops on gradient tape. Embedding weights were getting zero gradients.
  • Refactored: 7 backward ops migrated from CPU-fallback to forward composition (ADR-009).
  • Added: SelectAdd, ScatterAdd backend ops for Embedding/Gather backward.

v0.8.3 = GPU SelectAdd/ScatterAdd Shaders ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-16)

  • WGSL compute shaders for scatter-add (no f32 atomics)
  • 27K readbacks → 1 GPU dispatch. HRM: minutes → seconds

v0.9.0 = CPU Parallel + GPU Batching + AVX2 SIMD ✅ RELEASED (2026-05-17)

  • CPU: parallel BatchMatMul (2-4x), cache-tiled blocked MatMul (3-5x), AVX2 SIMD (3.5x)
  • GPU: batched dispatch (50→1 submits), all resource keepAlive fixes
  • Go 1.26 minimum. Combined CPU: ~20-70x for large batch MatMul.
  • HRM GPU training validated: 160+ steps, loss converging

v0.10.0 = Distributed Multi-GPU → Q3 2026 (ADR-011)

  • Device struct with Index (CUDA:0, CUDA:1, ...)
  • Ring AllReduce for single-node data parallelism (port from Burn)
  • Distributed data loader (automatic batch sharding)
  • Device registry + capability reporting

v0.11.0 = Quantization + Model Zoo → Q4 2026

  • INT8 symmetric quantization
  • GPTQ/AWQ 4-bit
  • Pre-trained model loading
  • PagedAttention for LLM serving

v0.12.0 = Multi-Node + Production Serving → Q1 2027

  • Multi-node orchestrator (gRPC, port from Burn)
  • PD-disaggregation (prefill/decode split)
  • Continuous batching
  • Fault tolerance + checkpointing

v1.0.0 = LTS

  • API freeze (community feedback period)
  • Stable API guarantees, semantic versioning
  • Production hardening, comprehensive documentation
  • Goal: any Go service adds ML via go get github.com/born-ml/born

📊 Current Status (v0.7.1)

Phase: 🚀 Code Quality + Community Contributions Focus: Maintainability & Developer Experience Quality: Production-ready

What Works:

  • ✅ Tensor API (creation, operations, broadcasting)
  • ✅ Shape validation with NumPy-style rules
  • ✅ Zero-copy operations where possible
  • ✅ Tape-based reverse-mode autodiff
  • ✅ Gradient computation with chain rule
  • ✅ NN Modules: Linear, Conv2D, MaxPool2D
  • ✅ Activations: ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, Softmax, SiLU
  • ✅ Normalization: RMSNorm
  • ✅ Embeddings: Token lookup tables
  • ✅ Loss: CrossEntropyLoss (numerically stable)
  • ✅ Optimizers: SGD (momentum), Adam (bias correction)
  • ✅ CPU Backend with im2col algorithm
  • WebGPU Backend with zero-CGO GPU acceleration
  • ✅ GPU Operations: MatMul, Add, Sub, Mul, Div, Transpose
  • Math ops: Exp, Sqrt, Rsqrt, Cos, Sin, Log
  • Reductions: SumDim, MeanDim (keepDim), Sum, Argmax
  • Manipulation: Cat, Chunk, Unsqueeze, Squeeze, Expand
  • Indexing: Gather, Where
  • Gradient control: NoGrad, Detach
  • 31 Public API operations: MulScalar, Greater/Gt, Int32, etc.
  • ✅ Buffer pool for GPU memory management
  • ✅ Batch processing
  • ✅ Float32/Float64 support
  • ONNX Import: Parser, loader, 30+ operators (v0.6.0)
  • Lazy GPU Mode: GPU-resident tensors, deferred CPU transfer (v0.6.0)
  • Command Batching: Reduced GPU sync overhead (v0.6.0)
  • 50+ Raw Ops: Argmax, TopK, type conversions, broadcasting (v0.6.0)
  • Flash Attention 2: O(N) memory, WebGPU shader, 2x+ speedup (v0.7.0)
  • Speculative Decoding: 2-4x inference speedup (v0.7.0)
  • GGUF Import: llama.cpp models, K-quant dequantization (v0.7.0)
  • Burn Patterns: Pre-slicing, stride specialization (v0.7.1)
  • Parallel Utils: internal/parallel package (v0.7.1)

Performance (v0.2.0):

  • MatMul 1024×1024: 123x speedup (GPU vs CPU)
  • MNIST Inference: 10.9x speedup (batch=256)
  • Throughput: 62,000+ samples/sec (GPU)

Performance (v0.6.0 - Lazy GPU Mode):

  • Training Step: ~90s → <5s (~18x speedup)
  • GPU Submits: ~200 → 1-2 per chain (~100x reduction)
  • GPU Memory: Automatic cleanup via finalizers

Transformer Support (v0.3.0):

  • LLaMA architectures ready
  • Mistral AI models ready
  • GPT-style transformers ready
  • HRM (Hierarchical Reasoning Model) ready

Validation:

  • MNIST MLP: 97.44% accuracy (101,770 params)
  • MNIST CNN: 98.18% accuracy (44,426 params)
  • Test Coverage: 53.7%
  • golangci-lint: 0 issues
  • Race Detector: Clean

Architecture:

  • Zero CGO (including GPU backend!)
  • Pure Go implementation
  • Type-safe generics (Go 1.25+)
  • Backend abstraction (CPU + WebGPU)
  • Decorator pattern (autodiff wraps any backend)

Platform Support:

  • Windows: Full GPU support (WebGPU)
  • Linux/macOS: CPU backend (GPU in v0.4.0)

History: See CHANGELOG.md for complete release notes


📅 Roadmap

v0.2.0 - WebGPU GPU Backend ✅ RELEASED (2025-11-28)

Goal: GPU acceleration without CGO dependencies

Delivered:

  • ✅ WebGPU backend (zero-CGO, migrated to gogpu/wgpu in v0.8.0)
  • ✅ GPU operations: MatMul, Add, Sub, Mul, Div, Transpose
  • ✅ Activations: ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, Softmax
  • ✅ Buffer pool for memory efficiency
  • ✅ Memory statistics tracking
  • ✅ Graceful degradation on systems without GPU
  • ✅ 123x MatMul speedup, 10.9x inference speedup
  • ✅ Windows support (Linux/macOS in v0.5.0)

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.


v0.3.0 - Transformer Primitives + Public API ✅ RELEASED (2025-11-30)

Goal: Enable modern transformer architectures (LLaMA, Mistral, GPT, HRM) + type-safe public API

Delivered:

  • ✅ Math operations: Exp, Sqrt, Rsqrt, Cos, Sin, Log
  • ✅ Reductions: SumDim, MeanDim (with keepDim), Sum, Argmax
  • ✅ Manipulation: Cat, Chunk, Unsqueeze, Squeeze, Expand
  • ✅ Indexing: Gather, Where
  • ✅ Layers: SiLU, RMSNorm, Embedding, Softmax
  • ✅ Gradient control: NoGrad, Detach
  • 31 public API operations:
    • Scalar: MulScalar, AddScalar, SubScalar, DivScalar
    • Comparison: Greater/Gt, Lower/Lt, Equal/Eq, etc.
    • Boolean: Or, And, Not
    • Type conversion: Int32, Int64, Float32, Float64, Uint8, Bool
  • ✅ 112 new unit tests, 0 linter issues
  • ✅ All autodiff operations with numerical gradient validation

Impact:

  • ✅ LLaMA architectures fully supported
  • ✅ Mistral AI models supported
  • ✅ GPT-style transformers supported
  • ✅ HRM (Hierarchical Reasoning Model) ready
  • ✅ External projects can use full typed tensor API

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.


v0.7.0 - Inference Optimization ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-10)

Goal: State-of-the-art inference performance

Delivered:

  • Flash Attention 2 - O(N) memory, WebGPU WGSL shader, 2x+ speedup on long sequences
  • Speculative Decoding - Draft model + verification, 2-4x inference speedup
  • GGUF Import - llama.cpp format, K-quant dequantization (Q4_K, Q5_K, Q6_K, Q8_0)
  • Online Softmax - Numerical stability for long sequences
  • 128K+ Context - Extended context length support
  • ✅ 0 linter issues, all tests passing

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.


v0.7.1 - Code Quality Refactoring ✅ RELEASED (2025-12-16)

Goal: Improved code maintainability via Burn framework patterns

Delivered:

  • Pre-Slice Bounds Elimination - Conv2D/MaxPool2D optimization
  • Stride Specialization - Fast paths for common stride=1, padding=0 case
  • Flash Attention Refactor - Complexity 111 → <30
  • Autodiff Orchestration - Separated orchestration from computation
  • Parallel Utilities - New internal/parallel package
  • Extended Backend Interface - Backward operation methods
  • ✅ 0 linter issues, all tests passing

Community: Thanks to @marcelloh for Issue #14!

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.


v0.8.0 - Quantization & Efficiency (February 2026)

Goal: Production-ready quantization and developer experience

Duration: ~8 weeks

Key Features:

  1. Post-Training Quantization (CRITICAL)

    • GPTQ algorithm (4-bit, 8-bit)
    • AWQ (Activation-aware quantization)
    • 4x model size reduction
    • Minimal accuracy loss (<1%)
  2. KV Cache Compression (CRITICAL)

    • 4-bit/8-bit quantized KV cache
    • 2-4x memory savings
    • On-the-fly compression/decompression
  3. Jupyter Kernel (HIGH)

    • Interactive ML development
    • go-jupyter integration
    • Rich output (plots, tensors)
  4. Model Zoo (HIGH)

    • 10+ pre-trained models
    • Automatic download and caching
    • Version management

Target: February 2026


v0.9.0 - Production Serving (March 2026)

Goal: vLLM-class serving infrastructure

Duration: ~10 weeks

Key Features:

  1. PagedAttention (CRITICAL)

    • OS-style paged KV cache
    • 90% GPU utilization

    • Near-zero memory waste
  2. Continuous Batching (CRITICAL)

    • Iteration-level request scheduling
    • 10-23x throughput improvement
    • Dynamic batch size adjustment
  3. Kernel Fusion (CRITICAL)

    • Automatic operation graph optimization
    • 30-50% speedup
    • Burn-style fusion patterns
  4. MoE Support (HIGH)

    • Mixture of Experts architecture
    • Mixtral, DeepSeek models
    • Expert routing and load balancing
  5. API Server (HIGH)

    • OpenAI-compatible REST API
    • Streaming responses
    • Multi-model serving

Target: March 2026


v0.10.0 - Scale & Stability (April 2026)

Goal: Enterprise-ready scale and production hardening

Duration: ~11 weeks

Key Features:

  1. Multi-GPU Data Parallelism (CRITICAL)

    • Pure Go implementation (no NCCL)
    • Gradient all-reduce
    • Linear scaling to 8+ GPUs
  2. CPU SIMD Optimization (HIGH)

    • AVX2 (x86-64) optimized kernels
    • Neon (ARM64/Apple Silicon)
    • 10-50x CPU speedup
  3. Gradient Checkpointing (HIGH)

    • 80% memory reduction
    • Recompute activations during backward
    • Automatic checkpointing strategy
  4. Training Dashboard (MEDIUM)

    • Terminal-based TUI
    • Live loss/accuracy curves
    • GPU/CPU utilization monitoring
  5. Comprehensive Documentation (MEDIUM)

    • Complete API reference
    • 5+ tutorials
    • 10+ examples
    • Migration guides

Target: April 2026


v1.0.0 - Long-Term Support Release (After API Freeze)

Goal: Production LTS with stability guarantees

Prerequisites (STRICT):

  • v0.10.0 stable and battle-tested
  • API freeze period (2-4 weeks community feedback)
  • Zero critical bugs
  • Complete documentation
  • Multiple production deployments

LTS Guarantees:

  • ✅ API stability (no breaking changes in v1.x.x)
  • ✅ Long-term support (3+ years)
  • ✅ Semantic versioning strictly followed
  • ✅ Security updates and bug fixes
  • ✅ Performance improvements (non-breaking)
  • ✅ Backward compatibility within v1.x.x

Success Metrics:

  • Production deployments in multiple companies
  • 1000 GitHub stars

  • Active community contributions
  • Complete documentation and tutorials
  • Benchmark suite vs PyTorch/TensorFlow

🔬 Development Principles

Code Quality

  • Test Coverage: >70% for core modules
  • Linting: 0 issues (34+ linters via golangci-lint)
  • Race Detector: Always clean
  • Benchmarks: Performance regression tests
  • Documentation: Every public API documented

Architecture Decisions

  • Zero Dependencies: Core framework stays pure Go
  • Backend Abstraction: Easy to add GPU/TPU/WebGPU
  • Type Safety: Generics for compile-time checks
  • Memory Safety: No unsafe in tensor operations
  • Numerical Stability: Proven algorithms (LogSumExp, etc.)

Performance Philosophy

  1. Correctness First: Get it right, then make it fast
  2. Profile Before Optimize: Data-driven optimization
  3. Benchmark Everything: Regression detection
  4. Real-World Validation: MNIST, ImageNet, etc.

Community Driven

  • GitHub Issues for feature requests
  • Discussions for design decisions
  • Pull requests welcome
  • Transparent roadmap updates

📚 Resources

Inspiration:

Documentation:

  • README.md - Quick start
  • CONTRIBUTING.md - How to contribute
  • docs/guides/ - User guides
  • CHANGELOG.md - Release history

Development:

  • Go 1.25+ required
  • golangci-lint for quality
  • gogpu/wgpu for WebGPU (pure Go, zero runtime dependencies)

📞 Support

Bug Reports:

Questions:

Contributing:

  • See CONTRIBUTING.md
  • Good first issues labeled
  • Code reviews welcome

🚦 Feature Request Process

  1. Open GitHub Issue with feature proposal

  2. Community Discussion (upvotes, comments)

  3. Roadmap Review (quarterly)

  4. Prioritization based on:

    • Community demand (upvotes)
    • Implementation complexity
    • Alignment with vision
    • Maintainability
  5. Assignment to milestone

  6. Implementation with tests + docs

  7. Release with migration guide if needed


🔒 Stability Guarantees

v0.x.x (Current)

  • ⚠️ API may change between minor versions
  • ⚠️ Deprecation warnings provided
  • ✅ Migration guides for breaking changes
  • ✅ Semantic versioning followed

v1.x.x (Future LTS)

  • ✅ API stability guaranteed
  • ✅ No breaking changes in minor/patch
  • ✅ 3+ years support
  • ✅ Security updates
  • ✅ Performance improvements (non-breaking)

🎯 Success Metrics

Technical:

  • >70% test coverage
  • <1ms tensor creation (CPU)
  • <100ms MNIST training/epoch (GPU)
  • Zero memory leaks (validated)
  • 0 golangci-lint issues

Community:

  • >1000 GitHub stars
  • >10 contributors
  • >5 production deployments
  • >100 weekly downloads (pkg.go.dev)

Documentation:

  • Complete API documentation
  • 10+ tutorials
  • 5+ example projects
  • Migration guides for all versions

Version 5.0 (2025-12-16) Current: v0.7.1 (Code Quality) | Next: v0.8.0 (Quantization, Feb 2026) | Target: v1.0.0 LTS (After API Freeze)