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

Giving the interface a native feel with objects

Python is an object-oriented language. When we are building our Rust packages, we need to keep the friction of adoption low. The adoption of Rust packages would be better if we keep our interfaces as objects. Most Python packages have object interfaces. Calculations are done with inputs, and the Python object has a range of functions and attributes that give us the results of those calculations. While we did cover creating classes in Rust with pyo3 macros in Chapter 6, Working with Python Objects in Rust, in the Constructing our custom Python objects in Rust section, it is advised that we understand the pros and cons of doing this. We remember that classes written in Rust are faster. However, the freedom of inheritance and metaclassing with pure Python is useful. As a result, it is best to leave the construction and organization of the object interface in pure Python. Any calculations that need to be done can be done in Rust. To demonstrate...