pybind11 VS fastapi

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.

It has been an interesting exercise developing this wrapper component. The fact that it seamlessly integrates with the FastAPI framework is just a bonus for me; I didn't plan for it since I hadn't learned FastAPI at the time. I hope you find this post useful. Thank you for reading, and stay safe as always.

FastAPI is a modern, high-performance web framework for building APIs with Python, based on standard Python type hints.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to use Burr, an open source framework (disclosure: I helped create it), using simple OpenAI client calls to GPT4, and FastAPI to create a custom email assistant agent. We’ll describe the challenge one faces and then how you can solve for them. For the application frontend we provide a reference implementation but won’t dive into details for it.

That’s when I found FastAPI.

FastAPI & Uvicorn

Discussion at FastAPI GitHub: https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/2696

An API application framework (such as FastAPI)

It’s been my experience that async Python frameworks tend to turn IO bound problems into CPU bound problems with a high enough request rate, because due to their nature they act as unbounded queues.

This ends up made worse if you’re using sync routes.

If you’re constrained on a resource such as a database connection pool, your framework will continue to pull http requests off the wire that a sane client will cancel and retry due to timeouts because it takes too long to get a connection out of the pool. Since there isn’t a straightforward way to cancel the execution of a route handler in every Python http framework I’ve seen exhibit this problem, the problem quickly snowballs.

This is an issue with fastapi, too- https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/5759

Fast API.