diffrax VS Nim

Compare diffrax vs Nim and see what are their differences.

diffrax

Numerical differential equation solvers in JAX. Autodifferentiable and GPU-capable. https://docs.kidger.site/diffrax/ (by patrick-kidger)

Nim

Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority). (by nim-lang)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
diffrax Nim
21 347
1,230 16,079
- 0.9%
8.3 9.9
7 days ago about 20 hours ago
Python Nim
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

diffrax

Posts with mentions or reviews of diffrax. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-03.
  • Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
    62 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Dec 2023
  • [P] Optimistix, nonlinear optimisation in JAX+Equinox!
    3 projects | /r/MachineLearning | 14 Oct 2023
    Optimistix has high-level APIs for minimisation, least-squares, root-finding, and fixed-point iteration and was written to take care of these kinds of subroutines in Diffrax.
  • Show HN: Optimistix: Nonlinear Optimisation in Jax+Equinox
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Oct 2023
    Diffrax (https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax).

    Here is the GitHub: https://github.com/patrick-kidger/optimistix

    The elevator pitch is Optimistix is really fast, especially to compile. It

  • Scientific computing in JAX
    4 projects | /r/ScientificComputing | 4 Apr 2023
    Sure. So I've got some PyTorch benchmarks here. The main take-away so far has been that for a neural ODE, the backward pass takes about 50% longer in PyTorch, and the forward (inference) pass takes an incredible 100x longer.
  • [D] JAX vs PyTorch in 2023
    5 projects | /r/MachineLearning | 9 Mar 2023
    FWIW this worked for me. :D My full-time job is now writing JAX libraries at Google. Equinox for neural networks, Diffrax for differential equation solvers, etc.
  • Returning to snake's nest after a long journey, any major advances in python for science ?
    7 projects | /r/Python | 24 Jan 2023
    It's relatively early days yet, but JAX is in the process of developing its nascent scientific computing / scientific machine learning ecosystem. Mostly because of its strong autodifferentiation capabilities, excellent JIT compiler etc. (E.g. to show off one of my own projects, Diffrax is the library of diffeq solvers for JAX.)
  • What's the best thing/library you learned this year ?
    12 projects | /r/Python | 16 Dec 2022
    Diffrax - solving ODEs with Jax and computing it's derivatives automatically functools - love partial and lru_cache fastprogress - simpler progress bar than tqdm
  • PyTorch 2.0
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Dec 2022
    At least prior to this announcement: JAX was much faster than PyTorch for differentiable physics. (Better JIT compiler; reduced Python-level overhead.)

    E.g for numerical ODE simulation, I've found that Diffrax (https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax) is ~100 times faster than torchdiffeq on the forward pass. The backward pass is much closer, and for this Diffrax is about 1.5 times faster.

    It remains to be seen how PyTorch 2.0 will compare, or course!

    Right now my job is actually building out the scientific computing ecosystem in JAX, so feel free to ping me with any other questions.

  • Python 3.11 is much faster than 3.8
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Oct 2022
    https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax

    Which are neural network and differential equation libraries for JAX.

    [Obligatory I-am-googler-my-opinions-do-not-represent- your-employer...]

  • Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Oct 2022
    Autodifferentiable programming!

    Neural networks are the famous example of this, of course -- but this can be extended to all of scientific computing. ODE/SDE solvers, root-finding algorithms, LQP, molecular dynamics, ...

    These days I'm doing all my work in JAX. (E.g. see Equinox or Diffrax: https://github.com/patrick-kidger/equinox, https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax). A lot of modern work is now based around hybridising such techniques with neural networks.

    I'd really encourage anyone interested to learn how JAX works under-the-hood as well. (Look up "autodidax") Lots of clever/novel ideas in its design.

Nim

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-26.
  • 3 years of fulltime Rust game development, and why we're leaving Rust behind
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Apr 2024
  • Top Paying Programming Technologies 2024
    19 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2024
    22. Nim - $80,000
  • "14 Years of Go" by Rob Pike
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    I think the right answer to your question would be NimLang[0]. In reality, if you're seeking to use this in any enterprise context, you'd most likely want to select the subset of C++ that makes sense for you or just use C#.

    [0]https://nim-lang.org/

  • Odin Programming Language
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: Interest in a Rust-Inspired Language Compiling to JavaScript?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023
    I don't think it's a rust-inspired language, but since it has strong typing and compiles to javascript, did you give a look at nim [0] ?

    For what it takes, I find the language very expressive without the verbosity in rust that reminds me java. And it is also very flexible.

    [0] : https://nim-lang.org/

  • The nim website and the downloads are insecure
    1 project | /r/nim | 11 Dec 2023
    I see a valid cert for https://nim-lang.org/
  • Nim
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023
    FYI, on the front page, https://nim-lang.org, in large type you have this:

    > Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula.

  • Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023
    You better off with using a compiled language.

    If you interested in a language that's compiled, fast, but as easy and pleasant as Python - I'd recommend you take a look at [Nim](https://nim-lang.org).

    And to prove what Nim's capable of - here's a cool repo with 100+ cli apps someone wrote in Nim: [c-blake/bu](https://github.com/c-blake/bu)

  • Mojo is now available on Mac
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Oct 2023
    Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

    Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

    But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

  • NIR: Nim Intermediate Representation
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 2 Oct 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing diffrax and Nim you can also consider the following projects:

deepxde - A library for scientific machine learning and physics-informed learning

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

tiny-cuda-nn - Lightning fast C++/CUDA neural network framework

go - The Go programming language

flax - Flax is a neural network library for JAX that is designed for flexibility.

Odin - Odin Programming Language

juliaup - Julia installer and version multiplexer

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

equinox - Elegant easy-to-use neural networks + scientific computing in JAX. https://docs.kidger.site/equinox/

crystal - The Crystal Programming Language

dm-haiku - JAX-based neural network library

v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io