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

Interacting with the environment

We are at the stage in which the only thing that is holding us back from building a fully functioning command-line application is interacting with the environment. As stated in the previous section, this is an open-ended subject that spans anything from taking command-line arguments to interacting with servers and databases. As in the previous section, we will cover enough in order to get an understanding of how to structure Rust code that accepts data from the outside and processes it.

In order to explore this, we are going to get our stock application to take in command-line arguments from the user so that we can either buy or sell a stock. We will not over-complicate things by choosing whether to go short or go long, and we will not introduce storage.

However, by the end of this section, we will be equipped to approach building code that scales and accepts data from the outside world. With this, further reading on crates that connect to databases...