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

Chapter 3: Understanding Concurrency

Speeding up our code with Rust is useful. However, understanding concurrency and utilizing threads and processes can take our ability to speed up our code to the next level. In this chapter, we will go through what processes and threads are. We then go through the practical steps of spinning up threads and processes in Python and Rust. However, while this can be exciting, we also must acknowledge that reaching for threads and processes without thinking about our approach can end up tripping us up. To avoid this, we also explore algorithm complexity and how this affects our computation time.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introducing concurrency
  • Basic asynchronous programming with threads
  • Running multiple processes
  • Customizing threads and processes safely