SWIG VS PyO3

Compare SWIG vs PyO3 and see what are their differences.

SWIG

SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages. (by swig)
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SWIG PyO3
25 147
5,493 10,947
1.3% 4.0%
9.7 9.8
8 days ago 6 days ago
C++ Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

SWIG

Posts with mentions or reviews of SWIG. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-18.

PyO3

Posts with mentions or reviews of PyO3. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-05.
  • Encapsulation in Rust and Python
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    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
  • Rust Bindings for the Python Interpreter
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2024
  • Polars – A bird's eye view of Polars
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2024
  • In Rust for Python: A Match from Heaven
    2 projects | dev.to | 3 Jan 2024
    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.
  • Segunda linguagem
    3 projects | /r/brdev | 10 Dec 2023
  • Calling Rust from Python
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2023
    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

  • Python 3.12
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Oct 2023
    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
  • Removing Garbage Collection from the Rust Language (2013)
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Sep 2023
    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

  • Bytewax: Stream processing library built using Python and Rust
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jul 2023
    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.

  • Tell HN: Rust Is the Superglue
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jul 2023
    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.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SWIG and PyO3 you can also consider the following projects:

cffi

rust-cpython - Rust <-> Python bindings

CppSharp - Tools and libraries to glue C/C++ APIs to high-level languages

pybind11 - Seamless operability between C++11 and Python

Cython - The most widely used Python to C compiler

RustPython - A Python Interpreter written in Rust

djinni

milksnake - A setuptools/wheel/cffi extension to embed a binary data in wheels

JavaCPP - The missing bridge between Java and native C++

bincode - A binary encoder / decoder implementation in Rust.

JNA - Java Native Access

uniffi-rs - a multi-language bindings generator for rust