PyO3 VS egui

Integrating Rust into Python, Edward Wright, 2021-04-12 Examples for making rustpython run actual python code Calling Rust from Python using PyO3 Writing Python inside your Rust code — Part 1, 2020-04-17 RustPython, RustPython Rust for Python developers: Using Rust to optimize your Python code PyO3 (Rust bindings for Python) Musing About Pythonic Design Patterns In Rust, Teddy Rendahl, 2023-07-14

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.

I would not recommend FFI + ctypes. Maintaining the bindings is tedious and error-prone. Also, Rust FFI/unsafe can be tricky even for experienced Rust devs.

Instead PyO3 [1] lets you "write a native Python module in Rust", and it works great. A much better choice IMO.

[1] https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3

Same w/ Rust and Python, this is really neat because now each thread could have a GIL without doing exactly what you said. The pyO3 commit to allow subinterpreters was merged 21 days ago, so this might "just work" today: https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3/pull/3446

I expected someone to write a rust-based scripting language which tightly integrated with rust itself.

In reality, it seems like the python developers and toolchain are embracing rust enough to reduce the benefits to a new alternative.

https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3

Hey HN! I am one of the people working on Bytewax. Bytewax came out of our experience working with ML infrastructure at GitHub. We wanted to use Python because we could move fast, the team was very fluent in it, and the rest of our tooling was Python-native already. We didn't want to introduce JVM-based solutions into our stack because of the lack of experience and the friction we had trying to get Python-centric tooling working with existing solutions like Flink.

In our research, we found Timely Dataflow (https://timelydataflow.github.io/timely-dataflow/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837031) and the Naiad project (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/naiad/) as well as PyO3 (https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3) and we thought we found a match made in heaven :). Bytewax leverages both of these projects and builds on them to provide a clean API (at least we think so) and table stakes features like connectors, state recovery, and cloud-native scaling. It has been really cool to learn about the dataflow computation model, Rust, and how to wrangle the GIL with Rust and Python :P.

Would love to get your feedback :).

`pip install bytewax` to get started. We have a page of guides (https://www.bytewax.io/guides) with ready-to-run examples.

You can practice your Rust skills by writing performant and/or gluey extensions for higher-level language such as NodeJS (checkout napi-rs) and Python or complementing JS in the browser if you target Webassembly.

For instance, checkout Llama-node https://github.com/Atome-FE/llama-node for an involved Rust-based NodeJS extension. Python has PyO3, a Rust-Python extension toolset: https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3.

They can help you leverage your Rust for writing cool new stuff.

(2020).

Things have arguably become even nicer (although slightly more divergent between the two) since then: Python's `Optional[T]` can now be written as `T | None`, and the core container types can now be annotated directly (e.g. `List[T]` becomes `list[T]`).

Combined via pyO3[1], Python and Rust are a real joy to write together.

[1]: https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3

Thanks for the feedback!

It is definitely fixable. Take a look at https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/996 for some examples of how others have styled egui, or try out https://app.rerun.io/

Styling is done with `ctx.set_style`, but creating a nice style isn't very easy at the moment (basically you'll have to tweak constants in code, and then recompile). I'm working on making it easier as we speak though!

Nothing is wrong with that, it’s rather a workaround, ultimately I am trying to have one language only including the UI too (been playing with egui),so I don’t have to use JavaScript.

https://github.com/emilk/egui

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

That's fair. I don't have experience with other immediate mode libraries. It's good to hear that it's not an intrinsic limitation

https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#layout Here the author discusses the issue directly. They note that there are solutions to the issue, but that they all come with (in their opinion) significant drawbacks.

For my use case, if I have to do a lot of manual work to achieve what I consider behavior that should be handled by the framework, then I don't find that compelling and am inclined to use a retained mode implementation.

AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.

The creator of Rerun (Emil Ernerfeldt) also created egui [1], an immediate GUI library for Rust. The library is similar to Dear ImGui but it is written in Rust and can be used for desktop and web apps (compiles to WASM and uses WebGL, demo [2]). Desktop apps can target OpenGL (does not display correct colors on macOS, does not work in VirtualBox on Windows) or WGPU (uses native APIs for each platform, works without any problems, but the binary is a big larger).

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.

Honestly, frontend development especially with all these crowded frameworks and libraries always confused me so pardon my ignorance, which is why in a project I’m working on right now I’m trying not to use js, instead I’m using egui [1]

Zola is a static site generator and it’s crazy fast, using one binary only [2], also there’s Blades [3], same concept but supposedly faster, never tried it though.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

[2] https://www.getzola.org

[3] https://getblades.org

egui for a GUI library that makes me cry when I want to layout something simple but provides very powerful manual control over things