maturin VS rust-numpy

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.

On the contrary, it can use and interface with numpy quite easily: https://github.com/PyO3/rust-numpy

Once I figured out the right tools, it was easy. Its just "maturin new". It automatically converts python floats and strings. Numpy arrays come through as a special Pyarray type, that you need to unwrap, but that's just one builtin function. Using pyo3, maturin and numpy, https://github.com/PyO3/rust-numpy it's fairly easy.

If I'm understanding this documentation correctly then you may be able to pass the numpy array directly with func(df['col'].to_numpy) which may save some conversion.

Otherwise, though, Rust is an excellent choice. The many advantages of Rust (great package manager, memory safety, modern language features, ...) are already well documented so I won't repeat them here. Specifically for writing Python libraries, check out PyO3, maturin, and rust-numpy, which allow for seamless integration with the Python scientific computing ecosystem. Dockerizing/packaging is a non-issue, with the aforementioned libraries you can easily publish Rust libraries as pip packages or compile them from source as part of your docker build. We have several successful production deployments of Rust code at OpenAI, and I have personally found it to be a joy to work with.

Integration with numpy uses the rust-numpy crate: Example of method that accepts numpy arrays as arguments Example of a method that returns a numpy array to Python (this performs a copy, there ought to be a way to avoid it but the current implementation has been plenty fast for my use case so far)

This example maybe helpful.

Given that it's via pyO3, you could even pass the numpy arrays using https://github.com/PyO3/rust-numpy and get ndarrays at the other side.

Same no copy, slightly more user friendly approach.

Further criticism of the actual approach - even if we didn't do zero copy, there's no preallocation for the vector despite the size being known upfront, and nested vectors are very slow by default.

So you could speed up the entire thing by passing it to ndarray, and then running a single call to sum over the 2D array you'd find at the other end. (https://docs.rs/ndarray/0.15.1/ndarray/struct.ArrayBase.html...)

I believe converting between pandas Series (e.g. columns) and numpy ndarrays can be pretty cheap, right? Once they're in that format, you can use rust to work directly on the numpy memory buffer with rust-numpy. Otherwise, feather is a format designed for IPC of columnar data; pyarrow is in pandas (might be an optional dependency) and may be pretty quick for that, and rust has an arrow implementation too.

https://github.com/PyO3/rust-numpy