PyO3 VS Numba

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.

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.