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

Inspecting and working with custom Python objects

Technically, everything in Python is an object. The Python dictionary that we worked on within the previous section is an object, so we have already managed Python objects. However, as we know, Python enables us to build custom objects. In this section, we will get our Rust function to accept a custom Python class that will have number and numbers attributes. To achieve this, we must carry out the following steps:

  1. Create an object that passes itself into our Rust interface.
  2. Acquire the Python global interpreter lock (GIL) within our Rust code to create a PyDict struct.
  3. Add the custom object's attributes to our newly created PyDict struct.
  4. Set the attributes of the custom object to the results of our run_config function.

Creating an object for our Rust interface

We start our journey by setting up our interface object, as follows:

  1. We house our object that will pass itself into our Rust code in...