db-benchmark VS nushell

Real-world performance is complicated since data science covers a lot of use cases.

If you're just reading a small CSV to do analysis on it, then there will be no human-perceptible difference between Polars and Pandas. If you're reading a larger CSV with 100k rows, there still won't be much of a perceptible difference.

Per this (old) benchmark, there are differences once you get into 500MB+ territory: https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

I do think it was important for duckdb to put out a new version of the results as the earlier version of that benchmark [1] went dormant with a very old version of duckdb with very bad performance, especially against polars.

[1] https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270638 :

> Apache Ballista and Polars do Apache Arrow and SIMD.

> The Polars homepage links to the "Database-like ops benchmark" of {Polars, data.table, DataFrames.jl, ClickHouse, cuDF, spark, (py)datatable, dplyr, pandas, dask, Arrow, DuckDB, Modin,} but not yet PostgresML? https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/ *

LLM -> Vector database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_database

/? inurl:awesome site:github.com "vector database"

I agree with your conclusion but want to add that switching from Julia may not make sense either.

According to these benchmarks: https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/, DF.jl is the fastest library for some things, data.table for others, polars for others. Which is fastest depends on the query and whether it takes advantage of the features/properties of each.

For what it's worth, data.table is my favourite to use and I believe it has the nicest ergonomics of the three I spoke about.

Same. Numba does wonders for me in most scenarios. Yesterday I've discovered pola-rs and looks like I will add it to the stack. It's API is similar to pandas. Have a look at the benchmarks of cuDF, spark, dask, pandas compared to it: Benchmarks

The syntax has similarities with dplyr in terms of the way you chain operations, and it’s around an order of magnitude faster than pandas and dplyr (there’s a nice benchmark here). It’s also more memory-efficient and can handle larger-than-memory datasets via streaming if needed.

If interested in benchmarks comparing different dataframe implementations, here is one:

https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

Bad examples. Both numpy and pandas are notoriously un-optimized packages, losing handily to pretty much all their competitors (R, Julia, kdb+, vaex, polars). See https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/ for a partial comparison.

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-...

I appreciate what projects like Nushell and Murex are trying to address, but having a saner scripting language and passing structured data in pipelines is not worth the drawbacks for me.

For one, Bash scripting is not so bad if you set some sane defaults and use ShellCheck. Sure, it has its quirks, but all languages do. Even so, the same golden rule applies: use a "real" programming language if your problem exceeds a certain level of complexity. This is relative and will depend on your discomfort threshold, but using the right tool for the job is always a good practice. No matter how good the shell language is, I would hesitate to write and maintain a complex project in it.

And for general QoL improvements with interactive use, Zsh is a fine shell, while still being POSIX compatible.

[1]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/blob/main/crates/nu-comma...

[2]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5027

[3]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/9310

I found nushell (https://www.nushell.sh) to be an impressive replacement "bash" for Windows

In terms of philosophy, think "Powershell but actually intuitive" : Every data is structured but command names are what you expect them to be. I usually don't even need to look at the documentation.

I liked it so much that I also replaced my shell on Linux with it, so I have the same terminal experience across all OSes