Rust in February: Speed up Your Python

Rust Cologne is a monthly meetup dealing with everything Rust.
In this month's Meetup we'll have a look at speeding up your Python programs by using PyO3 to integrate existing and self-written Rust components. No prior Rust-knowledge is required.

(The meetup will likely be held in German but we'll switch to English if needed.)

Dear Rustacean,

you are hereby warmly invited to join the next Rust Cologne meetup. Whether you want to speed up your python code, write a web service, need interop with your C++-codebase, cross-compile for a microcontroller, write an emulator, … we've got you covered!

We commonly open up with a brief summary of noteworthy changes in the Rust ecosystem. Be it updates to the language itself, public events, its impact on other projects and languages, …

Python is known for its simplicity and shallow learning curve, making it a great first programming language. One of its strengths is drafting prototypes and quickly iterating ideas. Being a dynamically typed, interpreted, garbage-collected language comes at a cost though: computationally intensive tasks can be slow, memory consumption is often higher than needed and scaling a project beyond a certain size can make it hard to maintain or refactor.

This is where a systems level language comes into play. Historically the C programming language has been used to enrich the Python ecosystem by providing ready-made, reusable, highly-efficient building blocks. Using the same interface Rust can do the same while providing additional benefits: A highly expressive type system and lots of safety guarantees make the code easier to maintain and harder to crash. The PyO3-Project greatly lowers the friction for integrating Rust-written code into your Python project, by generating safe wrappers to seamlessly cross the boundary between the two languages.

We'll show a simple example for using PyO3 to speed up your Python by moving slow parts over to Rust. Feel free to bring your own code so that we can talk about different approaches and get an idea how simple or challenging such transformations can be for real-world code.

As usual, the remaining time is about whatever you want to talk about!

Always wanted to know why Rust is harder to learn than other popular languages or why it lacks a certain feature? When is it appropriate to rewrite a project in Rust? Is the compiler really that slow and are the binaries really that big? Do all those safety guarantees have an impact on the performance? Fetch a Glühwein (with or without alcohol) and let's find out.

See you soon!

Yours,
Florian and Kai

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If you have a topic you'd like to talk about, please let us know in advance. This way we can make sure there's a time-slot for you and maybe announce it officially. Thank you.