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

Technical requirements

We are no longer going to be implementing simple single-page applications that do not rely on any third-party dependencies as we did in the first chapter. As a result, you will have to directly install Rust onto your computer. We will also be managing third-party dependencies through Cargo. You can install Rust and Cargo on your computer here: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.

At the time of writing this, the best integrated development environment (IDE) by far for writing Rust is Visual Studio Code. It has a range of Rust plugins that can help you keep track of and check your Rust code. It can be installed using this link: https://code.visualstudio.com/download.

You can find all the code files in the GitHub repository for this chapter: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Speed-up-your-Python-with-Rust/tree/main/chapter_two.