nimformat

The nimformat library is the result of an experiment in using the excellent nimpy module, for the awesome Nim programming language, to create a test library, for Python. The goal was to learn some about Nim, nimpy, creating native Python modules, and to see what, if any, speed boosts could be realized.

Currently, there are negligible, if any differences in speed between Python and Nim native library when passing in a new dict of values. Experiments may continue.

The nim_sub() function is a rudimentary implementation of string substitution in a similar way to how Python accepts a dictionary for its string.format().

Install

• pip install nimformat

Build it yourself

The Nim native Python library can be built by issuing the following command.

Debug: nim c --app:lib --out:nimformat.pyd nimformat.nim

Production: nim c --app:lib --out:nimformat.pyd -d:release nimformat.nim

NOTE: This was done using the latest development version of Nim, which is 0.19.9 at the time of this writing.

Benchmarks

Simple benchmarks with Python's timeit module yield the following results. Tests were done with the following options for timeit:

timeit.repeat(
  setup=SETUP_CODE,
  stmt=TEST_CODE,
  repeat=3,
  number=20
  )

Times

Test	Time to Complete
Pure Python time	.000202s
Pure Python [no locals()] time	.000286s
Nim dylib [no locals()] time	.000547s
Nim dylib sub_multi [no locals()] time	.000220s

See test_nimformat.py for more details.

Use

Example 1:

import nimformat

variable1 = 'string'
variable2 = 'contains'

dictSub = dict(locals())
dictSub = {str(key): str(dictSub[key]) for key in dictSub.keys() if '__' not in str(key)}

strWithSubstitutions = """
This is a {variable1} which spans
multiple lines and {variable2} multiple
substitutions.
"""

strSubstituted = nimformat.nim_sub(strWithSubstitutions, dictSub)

Example 2:

import nimformat

dictSub = {
  'variable1': 'string',
  'variable2': 'contains'
}

strWithSubstitutions = """
This is a {variable1} which spans
multiple lines and {variable2} multiple
substitutions.
"""

strSubstituted = nimformat.nim_sub(strWithSubstitutions, dictSub)

Platforms

• ✅ Linux
• ✅ Windows
• ✅ Mac
• ✅ Android
• ✅ Raspberry Pi
• ✅ BSD