To get more familiar with Rust, I’ve lately been revisting last year’s Advent of Code problems, which I did in Go last December. My Go solution solution for Day 5 uses brute-force and is not very clever, but runs fast enough in Go (under 6 minutes). The Rust equivalent runs in 1/3 less time, and I was wondering how other languages would fare. The results might surprise you.

I ended up writing the solution in Rust, Zig, and C, in addition to the original Go solution.

I finally took some time this weekend to look at Zig, and I am very impressed. It’s a fairly low-level language, but could be appropriate for some performance-critical data science use cases. Based on an initial test, it is twice as fast as Rust, which is about 50% faster than Go. And it appears to be faster than C, which I find puzzling.

To explore the language, I rewrote a naive and computationally intensive brute-force solution to day 5 of last year’s Advent of Code. My non-sophisticated solution took 5:40 in Go for both parts, fast enough that I didn’t bother finding a more streamlined solution (which would have been necessary in Python). For comparison, I also rewrote the same solution in Rust and C.

There is increasing interest in using smaller large language models (LLMs), hosted locally instead accessed from cloud-based vendors such as OpenAI. My clients have been interested in these either from a cost point of view, or for data protection reasons (since no data goes to OpenAI or other vendors).

Although this has been done for a while from Python using (mainly) the excellent Hugging Face, new options have come available that makes this easier and more flexible, especially from other languages such as Go and Rust. Here are observations and tips on a few alternatives that I’ve been trying.

This year’s Advent of Code is well past the half-way mark, and I’ve been reflecting on some of the harder or more interesting problems over the last few years, and the lessons learned about making code faster, or large problems tractable.

In case you haven’t encountered it, AoC is an annual coding competition, with a new problem every day, from December 1 through 25. Each day, there are two parts, and the second (usually harder) part unlocks after you solve the first part. You can use any programming language, and only need to submit the right answer (usually a number) to solve each part.

I’ve been away helping Bain set up a new capability in generative AI, on the back of our OpenAI partnership, and am coming back to standard data science problems. In this post, I’d like to share some experiments doing linear programming optimization, using Gonum’s optimization library. It’s a very basic facility, but has helped me learn how to set up problems using the venerable Simplex algorithm, first developed by George Danzig in 1947.