maturin VS pybind11

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.

I'm investigating using C++ to build a REST server, and would love to know of people's experiences with Crow-- or whether they would recommend something else as a "medium-level" abstraction C++ web server. As background, I started off experimenting with Python/FastAPI, which is great, but there is too much friction to translate from pybind11-exported C++ objects to the format that FastAPI expects, and, of course, there are inherent performance limitations using Python, which could impact scaling up if the project were to be successful.

I have a C++ function computing a large tensor which I would like to return to Python as a NumPy array via pybind11.

This is based on the Google Ink Stroke Modeler C++ library, and using pybind11 to make it available on python.

pybind11 makes it easy to call C++ from Python if you want to mix.

If you've never used Pybind before these pybind tests[1] and this repo[2] have good examples you can crib to get started (in addition to the docs). Once you handle passing/returning/creating the main data types (list, tuple, dict, set, numpy array) the first time, then it's mostly smooth sailing.

Pybind offers a lot of functionality, but core "good parts" I've found useful are (a) use a numpy array in Python and pass it to a C++ method to work on, (b) pass your python data structure to pybind and then do work on it in C++ (some copy overhead), and (c) Make a class/struct in C++ and expose it to Python (so no copying overhead and you can create nice cache-aware structs, etc.).

[1] https://github.com/pybind/pybind11/blob/master/tests/test_py...

I have a python module for which the logic is written in C++ and I use pybind11 to expose the objects and functions to Python.

Reading from Python requires a wrapper, using pybind11 this is fairly done.

Also I can highly recommend starting using C++ to augment your Python code, i.e. find the parts that are slow or undoable in Python and write those in C++ then expose them as Python functions. You can use https://github.com/pybind/pybind11 to call C++ code from Python.