Book Image

Speed Up Your Python with Rust

By : Maxwell Flitton
5 (2)
Book Image

Speed Up Your Python with Rust

5 (2)
By: Maxwell Flitton

Overview of this book

Python has made software development easier, but it falls short in several areas including memory management that lead to poor performance and security. Rust, on the other hand, provides memory safety without using a garbage collector, which means that with its low memory footprint, you can build high-performant and secure apps relatively easily. However, rewriting everything in Rust can be expensive and risky as there might not be package support in Rust for the problem being solved. This is where Python bindings and pip come in. This book will help you, as a Python developer, to start using Rust in your Python projects without having to manage a separate Rust server or application. Seeing as you'll already understand concepts like functions and loops, this book covers the quirks of Rust such as memory management to code Rust in a productive and structured manner. You'll explore the PyO3 crate to fuse Rust code with Python, learn how to package your fused Rust code in a pip package, and then deploy a Python Flask application in Docker that uses a private Rust pip module. Finally, you'll get to grips with advanced Rust binding topics such as inspecting Python objects and modules in Rust. By the end of this Rust book, you'll be able to develop safe and high-performant applications with better concurrency support.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting to Understand Rust
5
Section 2: Fusing Rust with Python
11
Section 3: Infusing Rust into a Web Application

Chapter 9: Structuring a Python Flask App for Rust

In the previous chapter, we managed to solve a real-world problem with Rust. However, we also learned an important lesson, that is, the good implementation of code, such as adding vectors or merging dataframes, along with third-party modules, such as NumPy, can outperform badly implemented self-coded Rust solutions. However, we know that comparing implementation to implementation, Rust is a lot faster than Python. We already understand how to fuse Rust with a standard Python script. However, Python is used for more than just running scripts. A popular use for Python is in web applications.

In this chapter, we will build a Flask web application with NGINX, a database, and a message bus implemented by the Celery package. This message bus will allow our application to process heavy tasks in the background while we return a web HTTP request. The web application and message bus will be wrapped in Docker containers and deployed to docker...