Python's “Disappointing” Superpowers

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • languages-that-compile-to-python

    List of languages that compile to python

  • Coconut, F# (Fable)...

    https://github.com/vindarel/languages-that-compile-to-python

  • nimpy

    Nim - Python bridge

  • I've come to really enjoy programming in Nim. Note that Nim is very different language despite sharing a similar syntax. However, I feel it keeps a lot of the "feel" of Python 2 days of being a fairly simple neat language but that lets you do things at compile time (like compile time duck typing).

    There's a good Python -> Nim bridge: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy

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  • Robyn

    Robyn is a Super Fast Async Python Web Framework with a Rust runtime.

  • PyO3

    Rust bindings for the Python interpreter

  • PythonNet

    Python for .NET is a package that gives Python programmers nearly seamless integration with the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and provides a powerful application scripting tool for .NET developers.

  • Any .NET language with https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet

  • CPython

    The Python programming language

  • > JavaScript goes one step further though, and has no distinction between get-item accesses and attribute accesses.

    Can you explain a bit more about what you mean here?

    > Is it even possible to implement your own `MutableMapping` or `dataclasses` equivalent type in Python?

    Of course. With dataclasses that's what Python itself does; that's a pure Python module:

    https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.11/Lib/dataclasses....

    For MutableMapping, Python currently implements it as a C class for speed, but you could implement the same functionality in pure Python. That's what earlier versions of the collections.abc module did.

    > I know the latter requires custom plugins.

    I don't know what you mean here. See the pure Python module that Python itself provides above.

  • concrexit

    Thalia Website built on Django.

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  • rayon

    Rayon: A data parallelism library for Rust

  • If you don't know Rust, but know Python, you can install Python libraries written in Rust with pip. Like, pip install polars or pip install robyn. In this case you follow the two bottom links. But then you don't write your own libraries and stuff so.. I guess that's not what you want.

    But, if you want to learn Rust, you probably wouldn't start out with pyo3. You first install Rust with https://rustup.rs/ and then check out the official book, and the book rust by example, that you can find here https://www.rust-lang.org/learn - and maybe write some code on the Rust playground https://play.rust-lang.org/ - then, you use pyo3 to build Python libraries in Rust, and then use maturin https://www.maturin.rs/ to build and publish them to Pypi.

    But if you still prefer to begin with Rust by writing Python libraries (it's a valid strategy if you are very comfortable with working with multiple stacks), the Maturin link has a tutorial that setups a program that is half written in python, half written in Rust, https://www.maturin.rs/tutorial.html (well the pyo3 link I sent also has one too. You should refer to the documentation of both, because you will use the two together)

    After learning Rust, the next step is looking for libraries that you could leverage to make Python programs ultra fast. Here https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon is an obvious choice, see some examples from the Rust cookbook https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/concurrenc... - when you create a parallel iterator, it will distribute the processing to many threads (by default, one per core). The rust cookbook, by the way, is a nice reference to see the most used crates (Rust libraries) in the Rust ecosystem.

    Anyway there are some posts about pyo3 on the web, like this blog post https://boring-guy.sh/posts/river-rust/ (note: it uses an outdated version of pyo3, and doesn't seem to use maturin which is a newer tool). This post was written by the developers of https://github.com/online-ml/river - another Python library written in Rust

  • river

    🌊 Online machine learning in Python

  • If you don't know Rust, but know Python, you can install Python libraries written in Rust with pip. Like, pip install polars or pip install robyn. In this case you follow the two bottom links. But then you don't write your own libraries and stuff so.. I guess that's not what you want.

    But, if you want to learn Rust, you probably wouldn't start out with pyo3. You first install Rust with https://rustup.rs/ and then check out the official book, and the book rust by example, that you can find here https://www.rust-lang.org/learn - and maybe write some code on the Rust playground https://play.rust-lang.org/ - then, you use pyo3 to build Python libraries in Rust, and then use maturin https://www.maturin.rs/ to build and publish them to Pypi.

    But if you still prefer to begin with Rust by writing Python libraries (it's a valid strategy if you are very comfortable with working with multiple stacks), the Maturin link has a tutorial that setups a program that is half written in python, half written in Rust, https://www.maturin.rs/tutorial.html (well the pyo3 link I sent also has one too. You should refer to the documentation of both, because you will use the two together)

    After learning Rust, the next step is looking for libraries that you could leverage to make Python programs ultra fast. Here https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon is an obvious choice, see some examples from the Rust cookbook https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/concurrenc... - when you create a parallel iterator, it will distribute the processing to many threads (by default, one per core). The rust cookbook, by the way, is a nice reference to see the most used crates (Rust libraries) in the Rust ecosystem.

    Anyway there are some posts about pyo3 on the web, like this blog post https://boring-guy.sh/posts/river-rust/ (note: it uses an outdated version of pyo3, and doesn't seem to use maturin which is a newer tool). This post was written by the developers of https://github.com/online-ml/river - another Python library written in Rust

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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