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

Summary

In this chapter, we added a third-party pip module into our setup.py file so that we could add another entry point that could read .yml files. We read the .yml file and passed the data from that file in the form of a dictionary into our Rust functions, handling the complex data structure under the PyDict struct. We then downcasted data from our complex data structure into other Python objects and Rust data types. This gave us the power to handle a range of Python data types passed into our Rust code, giving us extra flexibility in how our Python code interacts with our Rust code.

We went one step further than complex Python data structures by accepting custom Python objects under the PyAny struct. Once we accepted custom Python objects, we could inspect attributes and set them as and when we wanted to. We even acquired the Python GIL to create our own Python data structures to help us work with the custom Python objects passed into our Rust code. To polish off our Python...