How to use Rust with Python

Python has become one of the most popular programming languages ​​in recent years. More and more technology projects, such as web pages and applications, are built using this language as a base. Python offers the developer a nice environment to write code, but it has a small drawback: it lacks speed. The latter is something that is left over to Rust.

Rust is a multi-paradigm programming language that emphasizes performance, type-safe concurrency in the project. With Rust, references always point to valid memory without requiring a garbage collector or reference counting, something that is always present in other memory-safe languages.

These languages ​​often put them up as each other's competition, but in theory they can work together, so Python benefits from the speed that Rust offers, while Rust benefits from Python's ease of use.

How Rust can be used with Python

To use Rust with Python, you must be familiar with both programming languages ​​in order to get the most out of them. Likewise, you must decide which will be the main language because the approaches of both languages ​​are almost entirely different.

Call Rust from Python with PyO3

With Python as the primary language, the integration with Rust is done like the integration of Python with C, which uses extensions written in C or using an ABI that is compatible with C. Extensions that are written in Rust use the same ABI would work the same way, though you'll need to use boxes designed for the purpose of providing bindings for Rust functions to the Python C API.

To create the Rust bindings in Python, the PyO3 project is used, which in turn takes advantage of another project, called Maturin, which works as a tool to create Rust boxes with bindings and Python packages. In Infoworld they explain “When installed in a Python virtual environment, Maturin can be used from the command line to initialize a new Rust project with Python bindings enabled. The developer uses directives in the Rust code to indicate which Rust functions to expose to Python and how to expose the entire Rust project to Python as an importable module.

PyO3 allows mapping between Rust and Python types “l Functions written in Rust can accept native Python types or Rust types converted from Python types. For example, a bytearray or bytes object in Python can be elegantly assigned to a Vec<u8> in Rust, and a string in Python can be represented as a Rust string.

Rust or Python, which programming language is better?

Among developers using both programming languages, Python comes out on top, but with only a slight edge over Rust, and here's why:

• Ease of code: Python is designed to be simple, it has a readable code structure and a simple syntax which makes it more accessible to any developer regardless of their experience, this is already a great advantage over Rust, a user-oriented language. systems programming and with a higher learning curve.
• Documentation: Again, due to its simplicity, the Python documentation is more friendly to beginning developers. Rust has extensive documentation and some ease of use but is more geared towards more technically savvy developers.
• Extensibility: With its huge number of libraries, and frameworks that support it, Python has more software and services that support its use and support this language.
• Community: Being open source, the community of both languages ​​is directly involved in the development and improvement of the language. Python is mature and has a large community, considerably larger than Rust.

At Rooststack, our developers have managed to develop several projects using Python, this being one of the most versatile technologies for creating applications and web pages. We have open vacancies to work with Python, you can contact us by clicking here, leave your information and start growing professionally.

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