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

Customizing threads and processes safely

In this section, we will cover some of the pitfalls that we have to avoid when being creative with threads and processes. We will not cover the concepts in depth, as advanced multiprocessing and concurrency is a big topic and there are books completely dedicated to this. However, it is important to understand what to look out for and which topics to read if you want to increase your knowledge of multiprocessing/threading.

Looking back at our Fibonacci sequences, it might be tempting to spin off extra threads inside our thread to speed up the individual computations in the thread pool. However, to truly understand if this is a good idea, we need to understand Amdahl's law.

Amdahl's law

Amdahl's law lets us describe the trade-off on adding more threads. If we spin off threads inside the threads, we will have exponential growth of threads. You may be forgiven for thinking this to be a good idea; however, Amdahl's...