maturin VS Numba

This story unfolds as a captivating journey where the agile Flounder, representing the Python programming language, navigates the vast seas of coding under the wise guidance of Sebastian, symbolizing Rust. Central to their adventure are three powerful tridents: cargo, PyO3, and maturin.

-- Maturin on GitHub

My new favorite way to write very fast libraries for Python is to just use Rust and Maturin:

https://github.com/PyO3/maturin

It basically automates everything for you. If you use it with Github actions, it will compile wheels for you on each release for every platform and python version you want, and even upload them to PyPi (pip) for you. Everything feels very modern and well thought out. People really care about good tooling in the Rust world.

Python first, you will be able to experiment quickly with the notebooks. Then maybe write (or rewrite) some modules in Rust that you can expose as python modules, with py03 and maturin. Feel free to publish useful packages on both crates.io and pypi.org, so you can contribute to Python and Rust ecosystems.

Now if you really want to use Rust, you can rewrite only the part that are slowing down your consumer. It's easy by using Py03 and maturin. Maybe also rayon to parallelize.

It's relatively easy to extend Python with project like Py03[0] and Maturin[1]. Polars[2] is the perfect example of that.

It's not easy to push coworkers/companies to use an unfamiliar language. Rust isn't fast to learn. You need very good arguments and a good usecase to make it works.

I doubt that learning Rust will help you more that learning more about the data engineers tools, so this isn't really "worth" your time.

[0] -- https://pyo3.rs/v0.18.3/

[1] -- https://github.com/PyO3/maturin

[2] -- https://www.pola.rs/

In this case, PyO3/maturin does all the setup and getting the module into Python. They also have docs going into a lot more depth on this.

Lastly if you're willing to introduce Rust, I'd consider a gradual approach using native libraries built in rust with PYO3. Check the maturin guide that helps you to streamline the build process of native libraries : https://github.com/PyO3/maturin . From there you could try to find hotspots in your python app and replace those with a native implementation.

Around the same time, I discovered Numba and was fascinated by how easily it could bring huge performance improvements to Python code.

Simulations are, at least in my experience, numba’s [0] wheelhouse.

[0]: https://numba.pydata.org/

That's very cool. Numba introduces just-in-time compilation to Python via decorators and its sole reason for being is to turn everything it can into abstract syntax trees.

A super-fast backtesting engine built in NumPy and accelerated with Numba.

Regarding speed, I don't agree this is a good argument against Python. For example, it seems no one here has yet mentioned numba, a Python JIT compiler. With a simple decorator you can compile a function to machine code with speeds on par with C. Numba also allows you to easily write cuda kernels for GPU computation. I've never had to drop down to writing C or C++ to write fast and performant Python code that does computationally demanding tasks thanks to numba.

Just for reference,

* Nuitka[0] "is a Python compiler written in Python. It's fully compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11."

* Pypy[1] "is a replacement for CPython" with builtin optimizations such as on the fly JIT compiles.

* Cython[2] "is an optimising static compiler for both the Python programming language and the extended Cython programming language... makes writing C extensions for Python as easy as Python itself."

* Numba[3] "is an open source JIT compiler that translates a subset of Python and NumPy code into fast machine code."

* Pyston[4] "is a performance-optimizing JIT for Python, and is drop-in compatible with ... CPython 3.8.12"

[0] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

[1] https://www.pypy.org/

[2] https://cython.org/

[3] https://numba.pydata.org/

[4] https://github.com/pyston/pyston

For the benefit of future readers: https://numba.pydata.org/

Taichi (similar to numba) is a python library that allows you to write high speed code within python. So your program consists of slow python that gets interpreted regularly, and fast python (fully type annotated and restricted to a subset of the language) that gets parallellized and jitted for CPU or GPU. And you can mix the two within the same source file.