fast-opex released

The OPEX (Object Predictions EXchange) format features heavily in our docker images for storing/broadcasting predictions. However, last week I noticed that it incurs quite a significant speed penalty due to its use of JSON schema under the hood. Since we want to be as fast as possible at prediction time, I sat down and rewrote the library using very basic (but fast) checks and released it under the name fast-opex. The new library works as a drop-in replacement, i.e., you only have to switch from installing opex to fast-opex.

To further speed things up, the new library can take advantage of the blazingly fast orjson JSON library. The orjson library only needs to be present in the environment and it will be used automatically.

If you are interested in a speed comparison, then head over to the following repository:

https://github.com/waikato-datamining/opex-comparison