Explorer is a dataframe library for Elixir. First and foremost, Explorer is an API for data manipulation. Its high-level features are:
- Simply typed series:
:float, :integer, :boolean, :string, :date, and :datetime.- A powerful but constrained and opinionated API, so you spend less time looking for the right function and more time doing data manipulation.
- Pluggable backends, providing a uniform API whether you're working in-memory or (forthcoming) on remote databases or even Spark dataframes.
- The first (and default) backend is based on NIF bindings to the blazing-fast polars library.
The API is influenced heavily by Tidy Data and borrows much of its design from dplyr.
The aim here isn't to have the fastest dataframe library around (though it certainly helps that we're building on one of the fastest). Instead, we're aiming to bridge the best of many worlds:
- the elegance of dplyr
- the speed of polars
- the joy of Elixir
That means you can expect the guiding principles to be 'Elixir-ish'. For example, you won't see the underlying data mutated, even if that's the most efficient implementation. Explorer functions will always return a new dataframe or series.
https://github.com/elixir-nx/explorer
