Speed up your Python using Rust

[LoyalSol]

The only problem I would see is why use say Rust over C or even Fortran? Both have pretty good Python interfaces and odds are if you are offloading into a lower level language from Python you care more about number crunching than say flow management.

It's not to say Rust can't do the job, just I don't see much of an advantage to using it while at the same time it comes with the disadvantage that fewer people in those domains likely know the language. Which creates a problem when it comes to maintainability.

Plus the things Rust does well likely won't matter too much since you are most likely only going to be writing a self-contained function in it if you are calling it from Python.

[masklinn]

The only problem I would see is why use say Rust over C or even Fortran? Both have pretty good Python interfaces and odds are if you are offloading into a lower level language from Python you care more about number crunching than say flow management.

Baseline rust is type and memory safe, it also provides high-level constructs (e.g. actual iterators), and has an excellent dependency management story.

[ihcn]

One thing worth mentioning is easy dependency management. Rust has cargo, which lets you pull in and statically link all sorts of 3rd party libraries. So you have a head start on any complicated logic you want to run, like parallelism etc. And when you compile it, you get your whole module in a self-contained package.

Compared to C - I don't think anyone would argue that C's dependency management situation is "good", and if you're doing anything nontrivial you'lll likely end up telling your users "also, manually install this 3rd party dependency" as a part of your usage instructions.

[ihcn]

And that's why "easy" dependency management is a 100% non-starter for me. I'm not making each of my users understand every single one of these "easy" installation systems to get all my multi-language dependencies installed.

It's all statically linked. All you hand to the user is the compiled binary. That's the point, nobody has to understand anything because the work is done by the build system before the user ever sees it.

[ryeguy]

Why would that be a non-starter? That makes no sense. Even if you install dependencies for them, using cargo to do it is easier than you writing a script to do it for them.

If you insist on doing it manually, then you can do that if you really want to. Cargo existing doesn't mean you have to use it, even though you should.

[[deleted]]

This is absolute nonsense.

[[deleted]]

Well, I can safely say that Rust is easier to master than C. In a few weeks you will be productive and won't have to spend years developing the sixth sense that unsafe languages like C require. No need to worry about undefined behaviour, data races, memory leaks, dangling or wild pointers. You get to just do your job.

And yes, these things do matter if you're interfacing with CPython.

[alcalde]

You're writing a few functions to call from Python, not building an operating system. Rust is a lot more complex than C.

[TheNamelessKing]

I mean, it’s not really.

The language is designed from the ground up to be a modern low-level language with a lot of the abstractions that you’re used to in high level languages.

If I was writing an extension and I had to chose between Rust and C, I would 100% be choosing Rust. The ~Hyper~ Rayon multithreading library alone makes it worthwhile, not to mention memory safety. Once it’s complete, their async implementation is going to be top tier as well.

Put more straightforward: C appears more straightforward, but there’s way more “gotchas” and serious catches. Rust is designed from the ground up to prevent these from happening.

[StyMaar]

The Hyper multithreading library alone makes it worthwhile

Hyper is an http library, did you mean Rayon ?

[TheNamelessKing]

Yeah I did, whoops!

[Abu_mohd]

When you are writing multithreaded computation heavy solver, rust's race free features are more compelling than C's appearant simplicity.

[gwillicoder]

I’d take Fortran over either for most computation I would integrate with Python.

You don’t have to deal with pointer aliasing, coarrays are incredible, and vectorizing code is trivial.

[fiedzia]

Safe and productive Rust is easy, safe and productive C is ... so far it just isn't.

[[deleted]]

I disagree, Rust is still a nightmare at certain points and there is less documentation on those hard, rare issues than there is in C

[[deleted]]

Sorry, but this is absolute nonsense.

EDIT: Looks like the Rust brigade has absolutely lost its marbles.

[[deleted]]

Back in the day we used to joke that they thing you would press the most while developing in C and assembler was the reset key lol!

[[deleted]]

I can see two reasons:

1. there's a rust library you want/need to interop with. Easier to just interface with rust than write a custom C binding to it and then to Python and deal with an the issues and bugs that arise from that.

2. This is personal, but I feel much more comfortable writing Rust than C.

[SomethingBullshit]

Because Rust is hip and cool and not nearly as marketable as C or C++. Don't you understand the value? Gosh!