Running Rust on Python

Intro

Everyone is super excited about rust and its starting to get a lot of attention from everyone due to different reasons such as is strong type checking, performance among others.

There is also a couple of rust libraries with interfaces in Python like polars.

Installing and using maturin

Maturin is a library that allows us to compile rust binaries into python packages, to install it run:

pip install maturin

poetry add maturin

Whenever maturin is installed you can create a new project by running the following command:

maturin new rustypython

This is the folder structure that we are going to get after creating the maturin project:

Parent folder
│   README.md
│   file001.txt
│
└─── .github
│   │   CI.yml
│   │   file012.txt
│
└───rustypython
│       │   __init__.py
│       │   main.py
│       │   ...
│
└───src
    │   lib.rs

Let’s create a very simple function that prints hello from rust:

Simply add the following code to src/lib.rs:

use pyo3::prelude::*;


#[pyfunction]
/// This is an example hello world function in rust
fn hello_world() {
    println!("Hello world!")
}

Afterwards, we need to add the function to the rustypython python package:

/// A Python module implemented in Rust.
#[pymodule]
fn rustypython(_py: Python, m: &PyModule) -> PyResult<()> {
    m.add_function(wrap_pyfunction!(hello_world, m)?)?;
    Ok(())
}

At the end lib.rs should look like this:

use pyo3::prelude::*;


#[pyfunction]
/// This is an example hello world function in rust
fn hello_world() {
    println!("Hello world!")
}

/// A Python module implemented in Rust.
#[pymodule]
fn rustypython(_py: Python, m: &PyModule) -> PyResult<()> {
    m.add_function(wrap_pyfunction!(hello_world, m)?)?;
    Ok(())
}

To compile and install the rust library into your python environment run:

maturin develop

The last step is creating the python package locally. Create a folder inside your project called rustypython, inside it initialize a __init__.py file with the following imports:

from .rustypython import hello_world

Later on in another python file with the name of your choice, add the following code:

import rustypython
from rustypython import hello_world

print(rustypython.__doc__)

hello_world()

If you run this code you should be able to see the message that you put in the print in rust.

You can always clone this example from my repository