arrow2 VS nushell

One of the interesting components of Polars that I've been watching is the use of the Apache Arrow memory format, which is a standard layout for data in memory that enables processing (querying, iterating, calculating, etc) in a language agnostic way, in particular without having to copy/convert it into the local object format first. This enables cross-language data access by mmaping or transferring a single buffer, with zero [de]serialization overhead.

For some history, there's has been a bit of contention between the official arrow-rs implementation and the arrow2 implementation created by the polars team which includes some extra features that they find important. I think the current status is that everyone agrees that having two crates that implement the same standard is not ideal, and they are working to port any necessary features to the arrow-rs crate and plan on eventually switching to it and deprecating arrow2. But that's not easy.

https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/issues/1176

https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2/pull/1476

https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2 https://github.com/apache/arrow-datafusion https://github.com/apache/arrow-ballista https://github.com/pola-rs/polars https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb

Currently datafusion and polars aren't directly operable iirc because they use different underlying arrows implementations, but there seems to be work being done on that here https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2/issues/1429

[arrow2](https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2) and [parquet2](https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/parquet2) are great foundational libraries for and DataFrame libs in Rust.

[1] https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2

In lockstep with arrow2's 0.13 release, we have published polars 0.23.0.

This is so freaking life-saving! - we have been using StreamingIterator and FallibleStreamingIterator in libraries (arrow2 and parquet2) and the existing landscape is quite confusing for new users!

arrow2 has support for mssql via ODBC (which microsoft has first class support to). Here are the integration tests we have (both read and write) against mssql specifically.

The first method is through downloading the pre-built binaries. With this method, you don't need to install anything other than Nushell's dependencies. Once you've downloaded the binaries, add them to your system's environment path to run it directly in your terminal.

I rather nushell for this purpose, it's more fun to write and easier to read.

https://www.nushell.sh/

These are just three small examples of what this shell written in Rust allows. The features are many and many more, but I'll leave it up to you to discover and enjoy them; I'm currently playing around with it and it's giving me a lot of satisfaction and immediacy, now it has a fixed place among the tools I use when working! The project is Open Source, so if you want to contribute, I invite you, as always, to do so, I leave you the link to the repo here!

Any thoughts on fish as compared to nushell [0]? It's similar to PowerShell in its philosophy and is also written in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/nushell/nushell

> In PowerShell, structured output is the default and it seems to work very well.

PowerShell goes a step beyond JSON, by supporting actual mutable objects. So instead of just passing through structured data, you effectively pass around opaque objects that allow you to go back to earlier pipeline stages, and invoke methods, if I understand correctly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof....

I'm rather fond of wrappers like jc and libxo, and experimental shells like https://www.nushell.sh/. These still focus on passing data, not objects with executable methods. On some level, I find this comfortable: Structured data still feels pretty Unix-like, if that makes sense? If I want actual objects, then it's probably time to fire up Python or Ruby.

Knowing when to switch from a shell script to a full-fledged programming language is important, even if your shell is basically awesome and has good programming features.

Maybe if the "popular" shells, but http://www.nushell.sh/ is looking better and better

Yeah agreed, especially now that PowerShell is available cross-platform.

Nushell[1] also seems like a promising alternative, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

I also discovered an existing discussion[1] related to this topic which includes a link[2] to a "helper to call nushell nuon/json/yaml commands from bash/fish/zsh" and a comment[3] that the current nushell dev focus is "on getting the experience inside nushell right and [we] probably won't be able to dedicate design time to get the interface of native Nu commands with an outside POSIX shell right and stable.".

[0] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[1] "Expose some commands to external world #6554": https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554

[2] https://github.com/cruel-intentions/devshell-files/blob/mast...

[3] https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554#issuecomment-...