db-benchmark VS pyodide

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.

We implemented an in-browser Python editor/interpreter built on Pyodide over at Comet (our users are data scientists who need to build custom visualizations quite often, and the most familiar language for most of them is Python).

One of the issues you'll run into is that Pyodide only works by default with packages that have pure Python wheels available. The team has developed support for some libraries with C dependencies (like scikit-learn, I believe), but frameworks like PyTorch are particularly thorny (see this issue: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1625 )

We ended up rolling out a new version of our Python visualizations that runs off-browser, in order to support enough libraries/get the performance we need: https://www.comet.com/docs/v2/guides/comet-ui/experiment-man...

Thank you! Yes, one of the items in the Roadmap is support for Pyodide (https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide) for running in-browser python on the results of each of the code blocks! This should allow most ML libs to be usable in-browser! This is pretty high-up on our priority list.

If I understand correctly, WASM only makes sense for compiled languages, you can run the python interpreter in WASM of course[1], but that will be at a significant performance disadvantage to the native javascript interpreter, and it's also something that has to be loaded every time you load the website.

[1]: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide

If you absolutely need something comparable to Sympy, then one option might be to figure out how to best call Sympy from Rust. e.g. - RustPython, although it seems like Sympy isn't supported yet - Pyodide, and figuring out how to run it outside of a web browser. Probably also not very easy. - PyPy, and having a pretty simple Python binary for every platform - ...

For running programming languages other than JavaScript in the browser there is Emscripten and WebAssembly. There is v86, where a Linux build is compiled to WASM. Folks have written QuickJS into a Linux build compiled to WASM, Node.js into the Linux buildroot https://github.com/cemalgnlts/now, so Python or CPython can be written to the image and loaded into the browser as WASM as well https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide.

There's a Python runtime that runs on WebAssembly (https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide). I have no idea what it's like, I've never used it.

Still in a quest to provide some tooling to quickly compose documentation websites: https://github.com/synw/docdundee . As I have tons of libs to document and was tired of managing restructured language for readthedocs I started with this, and now it has executable Python examples in the frontend via a Pyodide wrapper composable: usePython

This project's brand new and a lil hacky, but I've already reached out to the scikit-learn team, and they recommended that I experiment with using Pyodide as an alternative backend for the Python bridge.