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

Keeping our Rust implementation simple by piping data to and from Rust

We have covered everything we need to integrate Rust into our Python system. We can build Rust packages that can be installed using pip and use them in Docker when integrating with a web application. However, reaching for a setup tool can be too much effort if the problem being solved is small and simple. For instance, if in a situation we were merely opening a comma-separated values (CSV) file full of numbers in Python, calculating the Fibonacci numbers, and then writing them in another file, then it would make sense to just write the program in Rust. However, we do not start building a Rust package with Python setup tools if we have a more complicated Python standalone script that just needs a simple speedup with Rust—it is still just a standalone script. Instead, we pipe data. This means we pass data from a Python script to a Rust standalone binary and back to a Python script for computing Fibonacci numbers...