rust-numpy VS CheeseShop

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

By comparison, PyO3 handles virtually all that boilerplate, so your Rust functions can accept and return many native Rust types and everything just works (for example). Or maybe I'm missing some fundamental difference with how JVM data are handled versus Python.

At work, I'm using PyO3 for a project that churns through a lot of data (step 1) and does some pattern mining (step 2). This is the second generation of the project and is on-demand compared with the large, batch project in Spark that it is replacing. The Rust+Python project has really good performance, and using Rust for the core logic is such a joy compared with Scala or Python that a lot of other pieces are written in.

Learning PyO3, I cobbled together a sample project[0] to demonstrate how some functionality works. It's a little outdated (uses PyO3 0.11.0 compared with the current 0.13.1) and doesn't show everything, but I think it's reasonably clear.

One thing I noticed is that passing very large data from Rust and into Python's memory space is a bit of a challenge. I haven't quite grokked who owns what when and how memory gets correctly dropped, but I think the issues I've had are with the amount of RAM used at any moment and not with any memory leaks.

[0] https://github.com/aeshirey/CheeseShop