Back to Blog

FireDucks: Put Wings on Your Pandas Code

May 9, 2025
python
multi-processing

What if you could instantly speed up your pandas code—without changing a single line?

That's not a futuristic dream. That's FireDucks.

✨ What Is FireDucks?

FireDucks is an open-source Python library built by NEC Laboratories to accelerate pandas workloads without any code rewrites.

It mirrors the entire pandas API, meaning you can just do this:

python
# From this
import pandas as pd

# To this
import fireducks as pd

...and your code runs faster—sometimes dramatically so.

🔍 Why FireDucks? A Reflective Take

Most data professionals know the pain of waiting—those long processing times during large .csv loads, heavy groupbys, or chained transformations. We've learned to batch, optimize manually, or even rewrite in polars or dask to scale. But what if the bottleneck was never your logic—just your tool?

FireDucks doesn't ask you to relearn. It simply upgrades pandas from the inside:

✅ Multithreaded C++ engine for massive speedups
✅ Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler to optimize slow paths
✅ Lazy evaluation to avoid unnecessary work
✅ 100% pandas API compatible

If you've written pandas code anytime in the last 10 years, FireDucks lets you time-travel into a performance future—today.

🧪 Performance Insights

"We observed speedups of up to 125x over pandas, and 2.2x over polars, especially with large and chained operations."
— FireDucks Benchmarks

FireDucks is particularly effective when:

  • You're handling files > 1GB
  • You use groupby, apply, filter, or merge often
  • You don't want to rewrite your pandas workflows in a new DSL

💡 When Should You Use It?

📊 Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on large CSVs
🏗️ ETL Pipelines in production systems
🧾 Report generation from high-volume data
📦 Legacy pandas code that needs modern performance

If you've ever hit a performance wall in pandas and thought, "Should I switch to polars or Dask?", start with FireDucks. It's pandas—but turbocharged.

🧠 Getting Started

Install via pip:

bash
pip install fireducks

Then just replace your import:

python
import fireducks as pd

That's it. No code rewrite. No migration. Instant wings.

🔗 References & Deep Dives

🔹 Official FireDucks Documentation
🔹 Medium Article: FireDucks Overview
🔹 PyCon India 2024 Proposal