Numba VS SymPy

Around the same time, I discovered Numba and was fascinated by how easily it could bring huge performance improvements to Python code.

Simulations are, at least in my experience, numba’s [0] wheelhouse.

[0]: https://numba.pydata.org/

That's very cool. Numba introduces just-in-time compilation to Python via decorators and its sole reason for being is to turn everything it can into abstract syntax trees.

A super-fast backtesting engine built in NumPy and accelerated with Numba.

Regarding speed, I don't agree this is a good argument against Python. For example, it seems no one here has yet mentioned numba, a Python JIT compiler. With a simple decorator you can compile a function to machine code with speeds on par with C. Numba also allows you to easily write cuda kernels for GPU computation. I've never had to drop down to writing C or C++ to write fast and performant Python code that does computationally demanding tasks thanks to numba.

Just for reference,

* Nuitka[0] "is a Python compiler written in Python. It's fully compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11."

* Pypy[1] "is a replacement for CPython" with builtin optimizations such as on the fly JIT compiles.

* Cython[2] "is an optimising static compiler for both the Python programming language and the extended Cython programming language... makes writing C extensions for Python as easy as Python itself."

* Numba[3] "is an open source JIT compiler that translates a subset of Python and NumPy code into fast machine code."

* Pyston[4] "is a performance-optimizing JIT for Python, and is drop-in compatible with ... CPython 3.8.12"

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

[1] https://www.pypy.org/

[2] https://cython.org/

[3] https://numba.pydata.org/

[4] https://github.com/pyston/pyston

For the benefit of future readers: https://numba.pydata.org/

Taichi (similar to numba) is a python library that allows you to write high speed code within python. So your program consists of slow python that gets interpreted regularly, and fast python (fully type annotated and restricted to a subset of the language) that gets parallellized and jitted for CPU or GPU. And you can mix the two within the same source file.

Thank you for your interest. There are some interesting examples in the SWE-bench-lite benchmark which are resolved by AutoCodeRover:

- From sympy: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/13643. AutoCodeRover's patch for it: https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/blob/main/results...

- Another one from scikit-learn: https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/issues/13070. AutoCodeRover's patch (https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/blob/main/results...) modified a few lines below (compared to the developer patch) and wrote a different comment.

There are more examples in the results directory (https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/tree/main/results).

That's interesting. You should consider yourself lucky to have met Wolfram employees, as they are obviously vastly outnumbered by users of Mathematica.

I have not met any developers for either of these products but I know that SymPy has a huge list of contributors for a project of its size. See: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/AUTHORS

You may not be hearing about SymPy users because SymPy is not a monolithic product. It is a library. If you know mathematicians big into using Python, they are probably aware of SymPy as it is the main attraction when it comes to symbolic computation in Python.

https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/9479 suggests that multivariate inequalities are still unsolved in SymPy, though it looks like https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/21687 was merged in August. This probably isn't yet implemented in C++ in SymForce yet?

bug report opened https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/25507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36463580

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159017 :

> sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :

>> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [with the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPy, numexpr,]*

From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19084622 :

> "latex2sympy parses LaTeX math expressions and converts it into the equivalent SymPy form" and is now merged into SymPy master and callable with sympy.parsing.latex.parse_latex(). It requires antlr-python-runtime to be installed. https://github.com/augustt198/latex2sympy https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/13706

ENH: 'generate a Jupyter notebook' (nbformat .ipynb JSON) function from this stem formula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorization :

> Array programming, a style of computer programming where operations are applied to whole arrays instead of individual elements

> Automatic vectorization, a compiler optimization that transforms loops to vector operations

> Image tracing, the creation of vector from raster graphics

> Word embedding, mapping words to vectors, in natural language processing

> Vectorization (mathematics), a linear transformation which converts a matrix into a column vector

Vector (disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector

> Vector (mathematics and physics):

> Row and column vectors, single row or column matrices

> Vector space

> Vector field, a vector for each point

And then there are a number of CS usages of the word vector for 1D arrays.

Compute kernel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_kernel

GPGPU > Vectorization, Stream Processing > Compute kernels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...

sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :

> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [with the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPt, numexpr,]

pyorch lambdify PR, sympytorch: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/20516#issuecomment-78428...

Sympytorch:

> Turn SymPy expressions into PyTorch Modules.

> SymPy floats (optionally) become trainable parameters. SymPy symbols are inputs to the Module.

sympy2jax https://github.com/MilesCranmer/sympy2jax :

> Turn SymPy expressions into parametrized, differentiable, vectorizable, JAX functions.

> All SymPy floats become trainable input parameters. SymPy symbols become columns of a passed matrix.

Look at sympy.isprime for a carefully-optimized pure-Python solution (though if gmpy2 is installed, which it usually is, it will use that instead after trying the easiest cases)