cannoli VS modin

This is a great read, and it's fantastic to see all the work being done to evaluate and improve the language!

Shameless plug alert: the dynamic-nature of the language is actually something that I had studied a few years back [1]. Particularly the variable and object attribute look ups! My work was just a master's thesis, so we didn't go too deep into more tricky dynamic aspects of the language (e.g. eval, which we restricted entirely). But we did see performance improvements by restricting the language in certain ways that aid in static analysis, which allowed for more performant runtime code. But for those interested, the abstract of my thesis [2] gives more insight into what we were evaluating.

Our results showed that restricting dynamic code (code that is constructed at run time from other source code) and dynamic objects (mutation of the structure of classes and objects at run time) significantly improved the performance of our benchmarks.

[1]: https://github.com/joncatanio/cannoli

[2]: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/1886/

The interesting thing about Polars is that it does not try to be a drop-in replacement to pandas, like Dask, cuDF, or Modin, and instead has its own expressive API. Despite being a young project, it quickly got popular thanks to its easy installation process and its “lightning fast” performance.

Yeah, tried Polars a couple of times: the API seems worse than Pandas to me too. eg the decision only to support autoincrementing integer indexes seems like it would make debugging "hmmm, that answer is wrong, what exactly did I select?" bugs much more annoying. Polars docs write "blazingly fast" all over them but I doubt that is a compelling point for people using single-node dataframe libraries. It isn't for me.

Modin (https://github.com/modin-project/modin) seems more promising at this point, particularly since a migration path for standing Pandas code is highly desirable.

If anyone wants a faster version of pandas it’s not hard to find, modin for example uses multiple cores to speed it up, so if you have 4 cores it’s about 4 times faster than pandas, and has the same API as pandas.

Modin should fit. It implements Pandas APIs with e.g. Ray as backend. https://github.com/modin-project/modin

If you really want speed you should try modin.pandas which makes pandas multi-threaded.

I am guessing XGB is fairly optimised as it is. If you would want to use the sklearn libraries with pandas, look into Modin

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