Dlib 19.1 Released

cuDNN 5.1 is out and it isn't completely backwards compatible with cuDNN 5.0 due to a bug in cuDNN 5.1.  For the curious, in cuDNN 5.1 cudnnGetConvolutionBackwardFilterAlgorithm() will select the winograd algorithm even when the conv descriptor has a stride not equal to 1, which is an error according to the cuDNN documentation.  If you then try to run the winograd algorithm, which is what cudnnGetConvolutionBackwardFilterAlgorithm() says to do, it leads to the wrong outputs and things don't work.  Fortunately, this was detected by dlib's unit tests :)

Therefore, dlib has been updated to work with cuDNN 5.1 and hence we have a dlib 19.1 release, which you can download from dlib's home page.

I also recently realized that the fancy std::async() in C++11, an API for launching asynchronous tasks, is not backed by any kind of load balancing at all.  For example, if you call std::async() at a faster rate than the tasks complete then your program will create an unbounded number of threads, leading to an eventual crash.  That's awful.  But std::async() is a nice API and I want to use it.  So dlib now contains dlib::async() which has the same interface, except instead of the half baked launch policy as the first argument, dlib::async() takes a dlib::thread_pool, giving dlib::async() all the bounded resource use properties of dlib::thread_pool.  Moreover, if you don't give dlib::async() a thread pool it will default to a global thread pool instance that contains std::thread::hardware_concurrency() threads.  Yay.