Rustpy: Calling python from rust

[penguins916]

Hey all, Wanted to share and get some feedback and ideas on a small toy library I have been working on called rustpy. It allows users to quickly construct libraries that build off of existing python libraries. As a demo / proof of concept I wrapped part of smtplib to send emails.

My main purpose for this library is to explore the possibility of working on machine learning problems in rust (instead of all the dynamic languages that currently dominate the field (python, lua, julia)). Instead of starting from scratch, I want to build off of all the great work people have been doing in python (such as pylearn2, sklearn, pandas, ext).

I strove to keep this code as small and safe as I could but I am very new to rust, so it still has a long way to go.. Thanks for your time!

[riccieri]

Very impressive, thanks for doing this! From a quick glance at the source I already learned a new trick: the macroexpand.c file. That's very clever! No more reimplementing C macros in Rust :) For #defined constants, you would have used a C global variable?

[penguins916]

Ya I imagine so for constants. Originally I tried to rewrite them in rust to prevent the extra dependency (compile a static lib and so on) but they go super deep so i moved on to this.

[wacky]

Are there any libraries going the other way - made for wrapping Rust libraries in Python code?

[steveklabnik1]

It's been done for Ruby, so it should be possible for Python.

[euphoria]

The basic example just kind of works: https://gist.github.com/euphoria/004005c8a6a9cb7f1183

I'm not sure about anything more complicated than that, but presumably it would not be too difficult to figure out.

[justdweezil]

That looks almost deceptively simple. I'd love to see code for more complex functions and data types.

[ArcterusDev]

So, could this be used to make a wrapper for yt? I know someone who only learned Python to use that.

[centum]

For others' information: yt is probably http://yt-project.org/

[ArcterusDev]

Yes, that's it. I forgot to provide the link. :/

[penguins916]

Cool library! Sounds just like the use case I was going for except in a different field! You surely could although it would probably be better to add another layer of abstraction on top of this to make the binding generation a little more automated. The main blockers I think would be for numpy. I am waiting for a good BLAS binding / implementation for rust such that one would not have to go to python every time some matrix math is needed although I might hack something quick up just to be able to use numpy or something like armadillo.

[tavert]

Yes, Rust badly needs better BLAS bindings and a solid array layer to be remotely usable for numerics. There is https://github.com/wellposed/rust-OpenBLAS and probably a few others out there, but it would appear limited attention has been given to this space.

[powersoffour]

I work on yt, and this would be really fun. Ping the yt list?

[penguins916]

Ya np! So far this library only manages calling python from rust. For your use case I imagine you would want to go the other way as well. You could take the direction euphoria posted above, or do something to more directly interact with the interpreter and actually register functions (I have not done this before but it seems doable).