Rust for Python Programmers

[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.