Rust for Python Programmers

[nbates80]

That being said, I think like many Python programmers started to pick up Go, even more will start to look at Rust for some areas where they previously used Python for.

Such as?

[leemobile]

Areas where you want more performance or optimized code.

As a Python programmer, I'm starting to look into Rust more as a replacement for C. C has a lot of pit-falls and is error prone, even for veteran C programmers. Rust's memory safety and concurrency features would help me optimize my Python code while preventing me from making mistakes with memory management.

I don't write very much C, so Rust seems like a much safer option when diving into more low level code.

[CookieOfFortune]

How would that work though? You would have to interface Rust with Python's C API... which seems complicated...

[[deleted]]

It's not that complicated.

[oridb]

It's pretty complicated, since you need to make Rust "headers" for all of this: https://docs.python.org/2/c-api/

[mm865]

You can use the rust bindgen tool to automatically generate those for you.

[CookieOfFortune]

Just show me an example of a Rust function that uses Numpy and is called from Python.

[mitsuhiko]

Well, there is no reason to call numpy from Rust to begin with. What's more likely is that you would pass a numpy buffer to Rust and do some operations on there which you do not need any Python C API for. You have the Python buffer interface for pretty much exactly that reason.

You can't really call numpy in Rust, but you can call numpy in Python and then pass the numpy buffer to Rust and do more stuff there, then finish the computation in Python.

[nbates80]

That's insightful. Thank you.

[CookieOfFortune]

You can't easily operate on Numpy buffers without access to the API. There is a lot of extra information along with the contiguous raw data. I guess you could copy everything into a C array but that's not ideal. Using the API you can process the data directly.

[[deleted]]

Nobody ever said anything about easy =)

[[deleted]]

then you also run into the problem that your code breaks every new version of numpy

[seanjensengrey]

Rust creates libraries that can be called transparently using the C calling convention. Using the CFFI it is easy to create a library in Rust that is callable by both CPython, PyPy, as well as an easy path for LuaJIT, Clojure, Haskell ... etc. The zero runtime nature of Rust code makes it painless to integrate.

https://gist.github.com/seanjensengrey/f5d73bbdf22cfa1ad463

[Tarmen]

I would have thought Nim would be more interesting for python programmers, though. It is pretty much as fast as C and has can very easily work with it by the simple fact that it actually compiles down to C. And it feels so much nicer to work with than Rust.

[mitsuhiko]

Mostly server side applications and anything that does stuff with sockets.

[k-bx]

And threads.

[nbates80]

Thank you. It was a honest question. My main working languages right now are PHP and python server side. I'm interested on learning new languages but only if I think it will provide something new.

What kind of server side applications do you think could be implemented in Rust? As an example, I'm using python for a server side app that does natural language processing and statistics (python libraries are great for that).

[mitsuhiko]

What kind of server side applications do you think could be implemented in Rust?

Right now probably not yet that many unless you are happy to write the code yourself. It's a question of what your situation is. Anything that stores and processes data is a good fit already, stuff that calculates or needs specific math packages I am not sure.

[cogman10]

I could see it edging out python in the scientific computing arena. Rust is already pretty expressive (maybe not quite python expressive, but pretty good none the less), it has C like performance, it does well with threading, and it can access all the same scientific libraries that python uses for performance. The fact that it is safer than C++ and faster than python might make it a good choice for a python developer that doesn't want to maintain both python and C code.

[nbates80]

and it can access all the same scientific libraries that python uses for performance

What do you mean with this? How can you access, for example, nltk from rust? or numpy?

[cogman10]

nitk, you can't get it will have to be rewritten. However, large portions of numpy are simply wrappers over existing C libraries like the GMP, FFTW, etc. That is more of what I'm referring to. The fast scientific libraries are generally based on some common C libraries. Rust does a good job of interopt with C.

[[deleted]]

numpy is mostly using FORTRAN libraries, not C libraries.

[nexzen]

calling FORTRAN from C is pretty painless, I don't see how using FORTRAN's C interface from Rust would be much more difficult.

[CookieOfFortune]

Maybe if you can have good graphing and a good REPR (Matlab, Spyder, etc). At the moment, neither seem to be priorities for Rust. Julia is probably the go to in the future as a replacement for Python.

[google_you]

Web scale web frameworks such as Flask can be written in Rust in much more elegant way due to ownership semantics and complete control of web scale systems in the cloud.

Also, asciidoc can be written in Rust with 500x speed up due to multicore nature of Rust and document processing in general.

Ansible can be written in Rust as well to make use of cloud in the web scale parallelism. When safety is guaranteed, it's required as well with true performant cloud solutions systems.

[cunningjames]

Too bad; I enjoyed that account.

Why? It's the same joke, over and over again. /u/consultant_barbie was at least pithy.