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  • Hacker News
  • jax in the browser on WebGPU next please?
    by hessammehr
  • This is nice actually!
    by saliei
  • Does this bring me closer to being able to run notebooks natively on my ipad?
    by ballooney
  • It also works with Pytensor & PyMC!
    by SylvainCorlay
  • Emscripten-forge looks like 32-bit.

    I don't understand the article. It stresses that you don't need to run code on a Python server any more.

    That assumes that the only option for scientists is to interact with the browser. Scientists used to be able to write Fortran and didn't rely on a crappy web interface. That was of course when they did science instead of blogging about tools.

    by 32191868
  • Are there some benchmarks of the browser vs non-browser version? I.e., what are the absolute numbers behind

    > Numba delivers a roughly 250× speedup in WebAssembly, compared with about 90× natively.

    by lmc
  • Congrats for a serious engineering achievement!

    I had experimented with a similar idea in an infinitely more primitive way more than ten years ago (https://cyrille.rossant.net/numpy-browser-llvm/). I'm glad to see so much progress since then.

    by rossant
  • This is awesome! For those here not familiar with Numba, it helps bridge that performance vs ergonomics tradeoff that's always existed when you reach for python over a lower level but faster lang like C or C++.

    Sure you could write Cython but then you have to have a build step and make wheels for every platform you and python version. Sure numpy has gotten faster over the years but you're still hampered by the GIL.

    Numba is a little magic because you get to write stuff that feels like numpy, but get literal bytecode perf.

    BUT there's a cost to this, which u learned the hard way when I imported a color map extension for matplotlib recently.

    I thought i was going to be importing a couple megabytes at most. But Numba+llvmlite alone is almost 100MB!

    This might be a drop in the bucket in some applications but for a color map library that has only two hot paths that need to be JITed, it's excessive.

    Overall though, love this achievement, and i love what's being done for in-browser (aka local-first) scientific computing!

    by momojo

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