Something not mentioned yet is that pandas is eager and copies memory quite liberally so even not too large datasets might blow up your RAM. Polars has an eager API but also a lazy one; I know they're also working on a query optimizer for lazy queries so you could theoretically handle even large data on a laptop for example.
Seconding this, the syntax feels SQL-like which I'm a fan of since I also sometimes have to write SQL queries. So they keep the mindset sharp and also are a clear paradigm to think in if I need to think about a polars dataframe.
I've used pandas before, and recently became aware of polars as it's part on Nushell by way of a plugin.
Why would you use polars over pandas?
Something not mentioned yet is that pandas is eager and copies memory quite liberally so even not too large datasets might blow up your RAM. Polars has an eager API but also a lazy one; I know they're also working on a query optimizer for lazy queries so you could theoretically handle even large data on a laptop for example.
because this way you wouldn't be using pandas. That must be a good reason by itself.
pandas is extremely powerful, but everything seems way more complex than it needs to be.
Better syntax, speed and memory.
Seconding this, the syntax feels SQL-like which I'm a fan of since I also sometimes have to write SQL queries. So they keep the mindset sharp and also are a clear paradigm to think in if I need to think about a polars dataframe.
Thanks both, the sql-like syntax is definitely something I'm enjoying in Nushell.
Just started using Polars, great to learn that data frame validation even exists. Thanks