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 5: Creating a Rust Interface for Our pip Module

In Chapter 4, Building pip Modules in Python, we built a pip module in Python. Now, we will build the same pip module in Rust and manage the interface. Some people might prefer Python for some tasks; others will state that Rust is better. In this chapter, we will simply utilize both as and when we want. To achieve this, we will build a pip module in Rust that can be installed and directly imported into our Python code. We will also build Python entry points that talk directly to our compiled Rust code, and Python adapters/interfaces to make the user experience of our module easy, safe, and locked down with user interfaces (UIs) that have all features that we want our user to use.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Packaging Rust with pip
  • Building a Rust interface with the pyO3 crate
  • Building tests for our Rust package
  • Comparing speed with Python, Rust, and Numba

Covering these...