FireDucks: Pandas but Faster

Don't use it:

> By providing the beta version of FireDucks free of charge and enabling data scientists to actually use it, NEC will work to improve its functionality while verifying its effectiveness, with the aim of commercializing it within FY2024.

In other words, it's free only to trap you.

Important to upvote this. If there's room for improvement for Polars (which I'm sure there is), go and support the project. But don't fall for a commercial trap when there are competent open source tools available.

While I agree, it's worth noting that this project is a drop-in replacement (they claim that, at least), but Polars has a very different API. I much prefer Polars's API, but it's still a non-trivial cost to switch to it, which is why many people would instead explore Pandas alternatives instead.

Thanks for the warning.

I nearly made the mistake of merging Akka into a codebase recently; fortunately I double-checked the license and noticed it was the bullshit BUSL and it would have potentially cost my employer tens of thousands of dollars a year [1]. I ended up switching everything to Vert.x, but I really hate how normalized these ostensibly open source projects are sneaking scary expensive licenses into things now.

[1] Yes I'm aware of Pekko now, and my stuff probably would have worked with Pekko, but I didn't really want to deal with something that by design is 3 years out of date.

No shade to the juggernaut of the open source software movement and everything it has/will enabled, but why the hate for a project that required people’s time and knowledge to create something useful to a segment of users and then expect to charge for using it in the future? Commercial trap seems to imply this is some sort of evil machination but it seems like they are being quite upfront with that language.

IMO, you made a good decision ditching akka. We have an akka app before the BUSL and it is a PITA to maintain.

Vert.x and other frameworks are far better and easier for most devs to grok.

It's not hate for the project, it's hate for the deceptive rollout.

Basically it's a debate about how many dark patterns can you squeeze next to that "upfront language" before "marketing" slides into "bait-n-switch."

Not sure if evil or not, but it is unprofessional to use a tool that you dont know how much it will cost for your company in the future.

Yeah, Vert.x actually ended up being pretty great. I feel like it gives me most of the cool features of Akka that I actually care about, but it allows you to gradually move into it; it can be a full-on framework, but it can also just be a decent library to handle concurrency.

Plus the license isn't stupid.

> We have an akka app before the BUSL and it is a PITA to maintain

I would imaging the non-Scala use case to be less than ideal.

In Scala land, Pekko - the open source fork of Akka is the way to go if you need compatibility. Personally, I'd avoid new versions of Akka like the plague, and just use more modern alternatives to Pekko/Akka anyway.

I'm not sure what Lightbend's target market is? Maybe they think they have enough critical mass to merit the price tag for companies like Sony/Netflix/Lyft, etc. But they've burnt their bridge right into the water with everyone else, so I see them fading into irrelevance over the next few years.

I've found actors (Akka specifically) to be a great model when you have concurrent access to fine grained shared state. It provides such a simple mental model of how to serialize that access. I'm not a fan as a general programming model or even as a general purpose concurrent programming model.

If it's good, then why not just fork it when (if) the license changes? It is 3-clause BSD.

In fact, what's stopping the pandas library from incorporating fireducks code into the mainline branch? pandas itself is BSD.

There is no code. The binary blob is licensed.

I actually do have some decision-making power in regards to what tech I use for my job [1] at a mid-size (by tech standards) company, and my initial plan was to use Akka for the thing I was working on, since it more or less fit into the actor model perfectly.

I'm sure that Lightbend feels that their support contract is the bee's knees and worth whatever they charge for it, but it's a complete non-starter for me, and so I look elsewhere.

Vert.x actor-ish model is a bit different, but it's not the that different, and considering that Vert.x tends to perform extremely well in benchmarks, it doesn't really feel like I'm losing a lot by using it instead of Akka, particularly since I'm not using Akka Streams.

[1] Normal disclaimer: I don't hide my employment history, and it's not hard to find, but I politely ask that you do not post it here.

Vert.x has the "Verticle" abstraction, which more or less corresponds to something like an Actor. It's close enough to where I don't feel like I'm missing much by using it instead of Akka.

I thought I saw on the documentation that it was released under the modified BSD license. I guess they could take future versions closed source, but the current version should be available for folks to use and further develop.

What are your criticisms of actors as a general purpose concurrent programming model?

It's just the binary that's BSD, not the source code. The source code is unavailable.