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

Packaging Rust with pip

In this section, we will be setting up our pip package so that it can utilize Rust code. This will enable us to use Python setup tools to import our Rust pip package, compile it for our system, and use it within our Python code. For this chapter, we are essentially building the same Fibonacci module that we built in Chapter 4, Building pip Modules in Python. It is advised to create another GitHub repository for our Rust module; however, nothing is stopping you from refactoring your existing Python pip module. To build our Rust pip module, we are going to have to carry out the following steps:

  1. Define gitignore and Cargo for our package.
  2. Configure a Python setup process for our package.
  3. Create a Rust library for our package.

Define gitignore and Cargo for our package

To get started, we must make sure that our Git does not track files that we do not want to upload and that our Cargo has the right dependencies with step 1.

  1. First...