Zasper - The JupyterLab Alternative
Written by Nikos Vaggalis   
Thursday, 23 January 2025

Zasper is a supercharged IDE written in Go that allows you to run data science workloads locally and efficiently.

Zasper started out as a front-end interface to JupyterLab like many others, but ended up as a ground up implementation of the Jupyter project.

It is written in Go and implements the Jupyter wire protocol to talk to the underlying IPython notebook kernels via zeromq sockets. 

That means that the Kernel handling is built with Go coroutines which are light weight and work independently, as such outperforming JupyterLab's which handling is done in Python.

zasper1

This Go aspect gives it the advantage of great concurrency, minimal memory footprint and exceptional speed.
As a matter of fact, the benchmarks show that Zasper in idle condition uses one fourth of RAM and one fourth of CPU used by Jupyterlab, while utilizes 26.7 MB of RAM and 0.2 CPUs when Jupyterlab uses around 104.8 MB of RAM and 0.8 CPUs.

Other advantages over Jupyterlab are that it sports a cleaner UI, is more responsive and can run tasks in parallel.
Saying that, Zasper is not just usable in Jupiter Notebook workloads but can run any REPL-style applications
and data science tasks as well. 

zasper2

Zasper is available for Linux and MacOS and comes in two flavors; as an Electron and a Web App. Installation instructions are up on its Github repo.

Although still in early development it's already causing a stir.
New features are constantly evolving and these are on the roadmap for the near future:

  • Allowing custom data apps support rather than just Jupyter Notebooks.
  • Easier integration with the existing tools.
  • Zasper Hub for Self Hosted deployment in the cloud.

It seems that JupyterLab has just found a worthy competitor.

zasper-logo

More Information

Zasper

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Last Updated ( Thursday, 23 January 2025 )