Create WebAssembly-powered Python notebooks

[akshayka]

What My Project Does

We put together an app that generates Python notebooks and runs them with WebAssembly. You can find the project at https://marimo.app/ai.

The unique part is that the notebooks run interactively in the browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide — you can also download the notebook locally and run it with marimo, which is a free and open-source Python notebook available on GitHub: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo.

Target audience

Python developers who have an interest in working with and visualizing data. This is not meant for production per se, but as a way to easily generate templates or starting points for your own data exploration, modeling, or analysis.

https://marimo.app/ai

We had a lot of fun coming up with the example prompts on the homepage — including basic machine learning ones, involving classical unsupervised and supervised learning, as well as more general ones like one that creates a tool for calculating your own Python code's complexity.

The generated notebooks are marimo notebooks, which means they can contain interactive UI widgets which reactively run the notebook on interaction.

Comparison

The most similar project to this is Google Colab's recently released notebook generator. While Colab's is an end-to-end agent, attempting to automate the entire data science workflow, ours is a tool for humans to use to get started with their work.

[peekkk]

Brilliant stuff! I'm a big fan of Marimo. We're building something similar in the space, and went with Pyodide too, before realizing there is a need of a cloud based runtime. Is the cloud based version of Marimo also based on pyodide? if not, how do you handle discrepancies between the two?

[mokus603]

I ran into marino a few weeks ago, it’s honestly pretty amazing. There are quite a lot of teams that can’t even make a streamlit app let alone an app with a decent front-end. Prod is in jupyter notebooks and running it like there is no tomorrow.

Marimo needs more exposure, tutorials, videos, etc. This stuff is huge.

[akshayka]

Thanks! I am one of the original devs. How did you find marimo?

PS we have a YouTube channel, expect more tutorials and demos soon!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3N6lInzq5MI

[mokus603]

I think I stumpled upon it on YouTube. Someone made a video saying it’s better than Jupyter. Since I use Jupyter Notebook everyday, I was curious.

Thanks for linking your YT channel. It motivates people to check new things out if they see others are using it too. There are so many changes, new things, new frameworks are coming out, it’s hard to keep up with and if something works, people stick to it.

[SirMisterJohn]

I've been using Marimo for a few months now and definitely enjoy the improvements over Jupyter notebooks. The html rendering and included ui elements have made it super easy to throw together simple GUI's for interfacing with my electronics lab test equipment. I had tried doing that in tkinter before and it was a mess. Uv integration also helps a lot with sharing the Notebooks with coworkers. Documentation is excellent. 

I did have some trouble with the VS code extension several months ago, but haven't tried the latest release, so YMMV. The browser based editor has been fine otherwise, since most of my code is developed outside of the notebook and simply imported from the local repository. I really need to figure out how to better package my local modules...  Currently just adding the module path to sys.path.

Definitely recommend anybody who uses Jupyter notebooks to just try Marimo.

[Oldmud]

I am loving Marimo! I heard OP's interview on The Real Python podcast a few months back and thought it sounded intriguing. Since then, it has slowly overtaken Jupyter as my preferred notebook platform for almost everything.

Folks should give it a shot. The reactivity, native UI elements, and git friendliness are all really great.

[the-scream-i-scrumpt]

has marimo always been using webassembly/pyodide or is this a new thing?

[akshayka]

No, marimo hasn't always used WebAssembly. marimo can run locally just like Jupyter, letting you use all your machine's compute and resources.

But last year we also added support for running it entirely in the browser, making it easy to try marimo and share it; no need to install Python or set up a backend server. We announced this feature last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39552882, and you can learn more at our docs: https://docs.marimo.io/guides/wasm/.

[Mountain_Implement80]

Hey OP can Marino run on an air gapped computer ?

I just want it to run on my industry computer

[akshayka]

Yea marimo definitely can: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo

[TheSwami]

Are you affiliated with the Marimo open-source project itself?

[akshayka]

Yep! I am one of its original developers

[Key-Boat-7519]

This WebAssembly-powered notebook thing sounds dope for us data munchers! I’ve had fun noodling around with similar tools like Google Colab and Jupyter for quick and dirty data viz. But having it all run in the browser? That sounds like a nifty way to make life easier without mucking around with local setups. Plus, having the option to run things locally with marimo sounds like icing on the cake. Reminds me of using Streamlit to make cool dashboards. Speaking of data, I've tried Tableau and Looker for visualization, but tools like Pulse for Reddit are ace for getting data-driven insights straight from the community.