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

Deploying Flask and Celery with Rust

For our Flask application's Docker image to support our Rust packages, we need to make some changes to the src/Dockerfile file. Looking at this file, we can see that our image is built on python:3.6.13-stretch. This is essentially a Linux environment with Python installed. When we see this, we realize that we can be confident in manipulating our Docker image environment. If we can do this in Linux, there is a high chance we can do this in our Docker image. Considering this, what we must do in our src/Dockerfile file is install Rust and register cargo with the following code:

. . .
RUN apt-get update -y
RUN apt-get install -y python3-dev python-dev gcc
# setup rust
RUN curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | bash -s -- -y –profile 
  minimal –no-modify-path
# Add .cargo/bin to PATH
ENV PATH="/root/.cargo/bin:${PATH}"
. . .

Luckily for us, Rust is very easy to install. Remember that the apt-get install -y python3...