I Use Nim Instead of Python for Data Processing

Re:I Use Nim Instead of Python for Data Processing by julianeon on Friday September 06, 2024 @02:18AM (#41463371)

I don't think the advantage here is so much that Nim is fast, as Python is slow. If you're willing to dump Python you have many compiled language options, but I'll pick two: C and Rust.

For the kind of tasks the author outlines, I'd use AI. It excels at this: these are really simple, well-defined tasks it won't screw up.

So what I would do is pick a faster language - I'd pick Rust - then ask AI to script it and then repeat for as many tasks as you need.

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Re:I Use Nim Instead of Python for Data Processing by benjamin-lee on Friday September 06, 2024 @10:14AM (#41466435)

Author here. This is basically the approach I am using these days to get maximum multithreaded performance for when it really counts (inner loops) [1]. I draft in Python and use Copilot to convert it to Rust, then optimize from there. However, Nim is still better than Rust in my opinion for simple scripts that I don't want to spend a bunch of time writing. Its only major downside is its relative lack of support for parallelism and bioinformatics (i.e., why I used Rust for a more serious project).

[1] https://github.com/Benjamin-Lee/circkit

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