Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 3rd January 2024

Fastest Way to Read Excel in Python (via) Haki Benita produced a meticulously researched and written exploration of the options for reading a large Excel spreadsheet into Python. He explored Pandas, Tablib, Openpyxl, shelling out to LibreOffice, DuckDB and python-calamine (a Python wrapper of a Rust library). Calamine was the winner, taking 3.58s to read 500,00 rows—compared to Pandas in last place at 32.98s.

# 8:04 pm / rust, duckdb, python, pandas, excel, haki-benita

container2wasm (via) “Converts a container to WASM with emulation by Bochs (for x86_64 containers) and TinyEMU (for riscv64 containers)”—effectively letting you take a Docker container and turn it into a WebAssembly blob that can then run in any WebAssembly host environment, including the browser.

Run “c2w ubuntu:22.04 out.wasm” to output a WASM binary for the Ubuntu 22:04 container from Docker Hub, then “wasmtime out.wasm uname -a” to run a command.

Even better, check out the live browser demos linked fro the README, which let you do things like run a Python interpreter in a Docker container directly in your browser.

# 11:21 pm / docker, webassembly