There are lots of cases where people use e.g. ROS on robots and Python to do inferences, which basically converts a ROS binary image message data into a Python list of bytes (ugh), then convert that into numpy (ugh), and then feed that into TensorFlow to do inferences. This pipeline is extremely sub-optimal, but it's what most people probably do.
All because nobody has really provided off the shelf usable deployment libraries. That Bazel stuff if you want to use the C++ API? Big nope. Way too cumbersome. You're trying to move from Python to C++ and they want you to install ... Java? WTF?
Also, some of the best neural net research out there has you run "./run_inference.sh" or some other abomination of a Jupyter notebook instead of an installable, deployable library. To their credit, good neural net engineers aren't expected to be good software engineers, but I'm just pointing out that there's a big gap between good neural nets and deployable neural nets.
All because nobody has really provided off the shelf usable deployment libraries. That Bazel stuff if you want to use the C++ API? Big nope. Way too cumbersome. You're trying to move from Python to C++ and they want you to install ... Java? WTF?
Also, some of the best neural net research out there has you run "./run_inference.sh" or some other abomination of a Jupyter notebook instead of an installable, deployable library. To their credit, good neural net engineers aren't expected to be good software engineers, but I'm just pointing out that there's a big gap between good neural nets and deployable neural nets.