logoalt Hacker News

ajross • yesterday at 2:59 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

Yeah, this is numba. I find it really frustrating the extent to which people don't know about it.

Folks, numba is great. To first approximation: write your python function to "look like C"[1] and work over the numpy arrays you probably already have and understand, put a "@jit" decorator on it, and you're done. It JITs and runs your code natively at native performance.

With some extra effort, there are features for SIMD vectorization and thread parallelism, and even GPU backends (that, full disclosure, I've been pretty frustrated by -- but they do work).

[1] Which is to say, don't touch Python interpreter data structures. No dicts or objects or lists or strings, etc... If you're bound by the interpreter[2] you're bound by the interpreter and nothing is going to help you.

[2] A corrolary here is that the kind of C code numba is NOT good for is "following pointers between structs", which is something that can't be expressed in either python or numpy.


Replies

Dylan16807 • today at 12:17 AM

> No dicts or objects or lists or strings, etc.

That's a really intense restriction. Sounds like the name fits; it's not general purpose, it's jit for number crunching and little else.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "bound by the interpreter" but there's nothing about touching those data structures that requires the interpreter to be involved in most cases. The problem of slow APIs can be solved by the JIT having intimate knowledge of python's internals, can't it?

➕ show 1 reply
bheztio • yesterday at 11:49 PM

Last I tried numba, admittedly a long time ago, it was a pain due to extensive system requirements or alternatively requiring use of conda, which I dislike (for many reasons, but it's besides the point - I want to use standard python tools). Did they start to bundle their dependencies or..?

➕ show 1 reply
sgarland • yesterday at 4:32 PM

I posted it as well before scrolling down and seeing yours. Deleted mine, as your post goes into much more detail.

I don’t know how people who’ve worked with Python and been frustrated with its performance don’t know about Numba.

ainch • yesterday at 10:28 PM

if you want GPU-backed/compiled numpy code then JAX is also a good option.