WEBVTT 00:00:00.220 --> 00:00:02.400 Lent the entire CPython code base from scratch. 00:00:02.950 --> 00:00:06.460 It takes 0.3 seconds, three blinks of an eye. 00:00:06.860 --> 00:00:08.900 That is rough, and it's written in Rust. 00:00:09.250 --> 00:00:11.800 So are Pydantic, Polars, uv, and Granian. 00:00:12.300 --> 00:00:14.620 Rust shows up in Python in three ways. 00:00:15.140 --> 00:00:24.280 Tools that happen to be written in Rust, libraries Python itself imports and runs, and servers that themselves run Python inside of Rust. 00:00:24.840 --> 00:00:27.160 This episode is Rust for Python developers. 00:00:27.740 --> 00:00:33.160 And Christopher Trudeau is back on Talk Python to discuss Rust and his latest course up and running with Rust. 00:00:34.060 --> 00:00:38.800 The core rule is that only one thing can own a value or variable at a time. 00:00:39.240 --> 00:00:42.860 Pass it around freely in Python and the garbage collector cleans it up. 00:00:43.220 --> 00:00:45.400 Do that in Rust and you get a compiler error. 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:52.620 This is Talk Python To Me, episode 563, recorded Wednesday, September 9th, 2026. 00:01:10.020 --> 00:01:14.720 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, the number one Python podcast for developers and data scientists. 00:01:15.240 --> 00:01:20.560 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. I'm a PSF fellow who's been coding for over 25 years. 00:01:21.100 --> 00:01:22.300 Let's connect on social media. 00:01:22.720 --> 00:01:25.780 You'll find me and Talk Python on Mastodon, Bluesky, and X. 00:01:25.960 --> 00:01:27.900 The social links are all in your show notes. 00:01:28.660 --> 00:01:32.180 You can find over 10 years of past episodes at talkpython.fm. 00:01:32.360 --> 00:01:35.600 And if you want to be part of the show, you can join our recording live streams. 00:01:35.920 --> 00:01:36.380 That's right. 00:01:36.600 --> 00:01:39.840 We live stream the raw uncut version of each episode on YouTube. 00:01:40.420 --> 00:01:44.760 Just visit talkpython.fm/youtube to see the schedule of upcoming events. 00:01:45.100 --> 00:01:48.720 Be sure to subscribe there and press the bell so you'll get notified anytime we're recording. 00:01:49.000 --> 00:01:50.560 This episode is brought to you by Sentry. 00:01:51.320 --> 00:01:54.320 You know Sentry for the error monitoring, but they now have logs too. 00:01:54.540 --> 00:02:01.680 And with Sentry, your logs become way more usable, interleaving into your error reports to enhance debugging and understanding. 00:02:02.220 --> 00:02:05.380 Get started today at talkpython.fm/sentry. 00:02:06.300 --> 00:02:14.100 And it's brought to you by the Talk Python in Production Book, an inside look at 10 years of the real-world DevOps behind the Talk Python sites and apps. 00:02:14.420 --> 00:02:17.160 Check it out at talkpython.fm/DevOpsBook. 00:02:19.560 --> 00:02:22.900 Christopher, welcome back to Talk Python To Me. Always nice to hang out with you. 00:02:23.120 --> 00:02:24.380 Yeah, thanks for having me back. 00:02:24.660 --> 00:02:27.400 I feel it's going to be a little old-fashioned, a little rusty. 00:02:30.280 --> 00:02:33.720 Yes, let's just start with the crap jokes and get them out of the way, yes. 00:02:34.160 --> 00:02:47.200 Yeah, oh yeah, this might not actually be the final Ferris joke or whatever, but no, we're going to talk about Rust for Python devs, specifically not for Rust experts, 00:02:47.740 --> 00:02:57.600 But I want to know enough Rust so that things like Pydantic, ty, if I ended up poking around them or some other extension, it would make sense, right? 00:02:57.760 --> 00:03:00.500 Or maybe write a little bit of Rust to speed up some of your Python code. 00:03:00.700 --> 00:03:07.260 It's obviously the most influential way to make Python extensions or core faster pieces, right? 00:03:07.500 --> 00:03:09.220 It seems to be the new way of doing things. 00:03:09.580 --> 00:03:20.520 And in fact, I saw something in the news this morning that one of the major CPU providers is switching to Rust for a lot of their device drivers and things like that. 00:03:20.590 --> 00:03:22.400 It does seem to be having its day. 00:03:22.740 --> 00:03:23.260 Yeah, absolutely. 00:03:23.780 --> 00:03:28.700 My joke used to be that if you switch to Rust, you're probably going to get VC funding. 00:03:28.930 --> 00:03:30.060 That was like three or four years ago. 00:03:30.720 --> 00:03:34.440 You know, that was when Astral and Pydantic and all that stuff happened. 00:03:34.880 --> 00:03:37.760 Now it needs Rust plus AI, but I think that's still true. 00:03:38.080 --> 00:03:38.620 So, yeah. 00:03:38.900 --> 00:03:39.220 Exactly. 00:03:39.460 --> 00:03:44.000 Now it's AI is the cornerstone, but if you could do Rust and AI, we. 00:03:44.460 --> 00:03:44.860 Why not? 00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:45.260 Yep. 00:03:45.500 --> 00:03:45.980 Why not? 00:03:46.100 --> 00:03:46.900 Just bring them all in. 00:03:47.320 --> 00:03:50.540 No, it's a really cool foundation for Python things. 00:03:51.060 --> 00:03:57.500 So we're going to talk about that and dive into it, compare it to Python, give some examples, give some tools, all those things. 00:03:57.940 --> 00:03:59.240 But it's been a while since you've been on. 00:03:59.460 --> 00:04:02.620 Give everyone a quick introduction of who you are and what you've been up to. 00:04:03.760 --> 00:04:05.760 So yeah, I'm a consultant. 00:04:05.820 --> 00:04:11.220 I mostly spend time working with teams either on architecture or technical processes. 00:04:12.300 --> 00:04:17.000 That tends to mean things like agile and lean and automation, CI/CD, all that kind of good stuff. 00:04:17.480 --> 00:04:21.000 And in my spare time, I still do a fair bit of teaching. 00:04:21.109 --> 00:04:27.700 And sometimes that's in person, sometimes that's virtual, and sometimes that's creating online courses for people. 00:04:28.060 --> 00:04:30.580 I spend a fair amount of my time in the Python space. 00:04:30.870 --> 00:04:32.880 I'm co-host of the Real Python podcast. 00:04:33.220 --> 00:04:36.400 So that tends to be where people, if they know my voice, that's from where. 00:04:36.760 --> 00:04:42.220 And lately I've been getting into Rust and figured you and I could chat about that. 00:04:42.420 --> 00:04:43.520 A lot of really cool things you're doing. 00:04:44.410 --> 00:04:48.220 I guess let's talk about getting into Rust. 00:04:48.760 --> 00:04:50.660 First of all, what was your background? 00:04:51.420 --> 00:04:55.340 Did you do C++, C, other compiled languages? 00:04:55.740 --> 00:04:57.600 Because it's a shift, right? 00:04:57.860 --> 00:04:59.620 Well, so this is it, right? 00:04:59.660 --> 00:05:03.360 You hear the rust is a hard language to grasp thing. 00:05:03.780 --> 00:05:08.800 And I don't, I didn't find it that way, but I don't want to diminish people who are saying that, right? 00:05:08.900 --> 00:05:11.880 Like this isn't because I'm so much smarter or anything along those lines. 00:05:12.380 --> 00:05:13.760 It's because I have that background. 00:05:14.400 --> 00:05:19.480 I was writing C when I was 13 or 14 years old. 00:05:19.640 --> 00:05:22.360 There weren't a lot of choices when I started out. 00:05:22.820 --> 00:05:34.160 So I have a grounding and, you know, I wrote device drivers and I wrote embedded systems uh don't haven't done it in a long time but i have that grounding that rust kind of expects you to 00:05:34.360 --> 00:05:47.360 have and it's closer to the machine there's less virtualization going on uh it's a lower level language than something like python uh in fact uh bob builder russ and i were talking about this 00:05:47.580 --> 00:06:02.540 because he's got into rust recently and he came from php and python so from that it's this whole other kind of experience and he was talking about the fact that he actually thinks it's made him a better Python developer because now he's thinking about memory and stuff like that a little more 00:06:02.820 --> 00:06:13.140 than you necessarily would if you've just come from Python. That's really interesting. I hadn't really thought about it because you and I are, I think, around basically the same age, at least 00:06:13.220 --> 00:06:20.940 technologically speaking. And I remember getting the C++ Primer Plus. This is so nice. C++. 00:06:22.180 --> 00:06:23.520 It's so much better. 00:06:23.980 --> 00:06:24.180 Yes. 00:06:24.360 --> 00:06:28.280 I just loved working in C++ and so on. 00:06:28.600 --> 00:06:38.840 So I've never known a world where I came to Python or JavaScript or other languages where I didn't already have that experience of, you know, void star star. 00:06:39.080 --> 00:06:39.920 What do I do with that? 00:06:40.160 --> 00:06:40.440 Exactly. 00:06:40.900 --> 00:06:41.680 These kinds of things. 00:06:42.060 --> 00:06:43.780 But, of course, that makes sense. 00:06:43.840 --> 00:06:47.800 You come from Python and PHP, and then you're like, whoa, why am I doing all this stuff? 00:06:47.940 --> 00:06:48.540 This is crazy. 00:06:48.940 --> 00:06:49.080 Yeah. 00:06:49.540 --> 00:06:51.660 And it's, you know, a big part of it. 00:06:51.680 --> 00:06:58.060 And I think the thing that folks who are coming to it from languages like Python find difficult is that whole memory management thing. 00:06:58.360 --> 00:07:00.460 And Python basically takes care of that for you. 00:07:00.720 --> 00:07:05.240 And so if you've never had to do that before, all of a sudden it's like, I have to do what? 00:07:05.420 --> 00:07:06.680 And why do I have to do that? 00:07:07.600 --> 00:07:09.600 And it can get a little persnickety. 00:07:11.180 --> 00:07:16.980 It's concept of only one thing can own a value at a time. 00:07:17.620 --> 00:07:25.100 it has objects, but the objects belong to somebody. And in Python, you just pass those things around willy nilly and you don't worry about it. And the garbage collector takes care of it. 00:07:25.500 --> 00:07:35.120 And that often turns into a compile error in Rust. And that's on one hand, it's the beauty because it makes sure that certain kinds of bugs don't happen. On the other hand, if you're not used to 00:07:35.120 --> 00:07:48.040 it, you know, there's a, there's a joke in the Rust world that there are no bugs. It's, it's all your time isn't debugging. All your time is getting it to compile. And that's because there's a lot of that, Oh, I'm just going to pass this around and wait, I can't. 00:07:48.580 --> 00:07:51.160 And so, yeah, that there's a lot of upfront work there. 00:07:51.700 --> 00:07:59.080 And I think for a new developer, that could be very frustrating because, you know, you don't, you can't play as easily. 00:07:59.300 --> 00:08:05.020 There's the threshold to getting started with something is higher because you're constantly kind of fighting the compiler. 00:08:05.440 --> 00:08:09.120 The flip side of it is their compile messages are absolutely fantastic. 00:08:09.860 --> 00:08:12.820 They, so when errors happen, they're very, very explicit. 00:08:13.180 --> 00:08:16.440 they often include something like maybe you need to do this. 00:08:17.040 --> 00:08:21.560 And from what I saw, they were right 80 or 90% of the time. 00:08:22.080 --> 00:08:32.520 So once you figure out the language, I mean like the, not the language of Rust, but the vocabulary they use for error messages, it's very much, oh, oh, okay. 00:08:32.640 --> 00:08:33.919 So that's kicking off the borrow checker. 00:08:33.919 --> 00:08:34.760 Now I understand that. 00:08:34.800 --> 00:08:34.900 Okay. 00:08:34.979 --> 00:08:35.640 I'll go fix it. 00:08:36.080 --> 00:08:39.560 So there's a few things you kind of have to learn to get to that, but it is fairly helpful. 00:08:40.719 --> 00:08:50.940 But again, that could just be my background and remembering days of C where the compile error was being triggered from three lines before it was actually talking about where the error was. 00:08:51.040 --> 00:08:56.980 And you kind of had to zone in around roughly where it was reporting it to figure out what had gone wrong. 00:08:57.600 --> 00:09:03.640 So, yeah, there's been some advances in technology since we were tapping out bits and bytes on rocks. 00:09:03.920 --> 00:09:04.000 Yes. 00:09:04.840 --> 00:09:05.140 Exactly. 00:09:05.340 --> 00:09:06.220 Making sand think. 00:09:07.320 --> 00:09:09.420 So I would like to just acknowledge it. 00:09:09.480 --> 00:09:11.740 Six minutes, 57 seconds into the recording. 00:09:11.940 --> 00:09:12.520 Borrow Checker. 00:09:12.800 --> 00:09:12.860 Yeah. 00:09:13.040 --> 00:09:14.140 Borrow Checker's been shouted out. 00:09:15.680 --> 00:09:15.900 Yes. 00:09:16.400 --> 00:09:16.500 Yeah. 00:09:18.139 --> 00:09:20.260 Maybe we should just do the quick version of that. 00:09:21.260 --> 00:09:22.700 We'll probably dig into it a little bit more. 00:09:22.920 --> 00:09:24.840 Before you do, I just want to wax poetic. 00:09:25.680 --> 00:09:28.740 Think back to the days of back in the 90s. 00:09:29.120 --> 00:09:32.660 I remember when I had my C++ Primer Plus book. 00:09:33.040 --> 00:09:35.820 And yes, folks, it was a book that was like the yellow pages. 00:09:36.520 --> 00:09:38.820 There was no, literally the internet did not exist. 00:09:39.440 --> 00:09:40.280 Well, the internet existed. 00:09:40.450 --> 00:09:46.660 There was Gopher, there was Telnet, but the World Wide Web did not exist at this time, like not for four or five more years. 00:09:46.940 --> 00:09:50.240 Anyway, I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is so hard. 00:09:50.380 --> 00:09:51.700 This is so much work when I'm learning it. 00:09:51.700 --> 00:09:53.960 And finally, finally I got it to compile. 00:09:54.150 --> 00:09:55.960 Like, oh, we're good at compiles. 00:09:56.140 --> 00:09:58.660 Like, no, no, no, no. 00:09:59.180 --> 00:10:02.960 That's just when the actual real hard debugging, problem solving starts. 00:10:03.400 --> 00:10:08.380 But you mentioned that with Rust, that the compiler checks are a little bit stronger. 00:10:08.700 --> 00:10:13.520 They check more things like proper memory management and variable sharing and things like that. 00:10:13.590 --> 00:10:24.860 So I think while it was a eye-opener that compiling was only the beginning of my suffering when I was learning programming, I think compiling does mean more in Rust than it used to in other languages. 00:10:25.300 --> 00:10:30.060 Yeah, there's a whole family of bugs that have to do with memory management. 00:10:30.480 --> 00:10:33.260 And what's worse is they tend to be a tricky set of bugs. 00:10:33.700 --> 00:10:37.440 They're the kinds of things that will crash sometimes. 00:10:38.280 --> 00:10:47.740 So if you go back to C and how it stores a piece of text in memory, it has the, you know, like, let's say we're storing the word Talk Python. 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:52.700 Well, we take the bytes for Talk Python and then we put a null on the end of it. 00:10:53.040 --> 00:10:56.940 And the compiler, when the code is working with it, it looks for that null. 00:10:56.980 --> 00:10:59.440 And that's how it knows that the string is finished. 00:10:59.740 --> 00:11:07.140 Well, if you accidentally write something longer than that, there'll be no null and it'll keep walking past that into the next chunk of memory. 00:11:07.540 --> 00:11:11.500 If you free the memory up, but you still have a pointer that points into that memory. 00:11:11.980 --> 00:11:12.080 Yep. 00:11:12.260 --> 00:11:14.680 But your computer will happily read that. 00:11:15.140 --> 00:11:22.740 And if you've got two strings in a row, what'll happen is you'll get the first string and then the lack of the null, and then you'll get the next string. 00:11:23.140 --> 00:11:26.080 And you might get a wrong message on the screen, but it won't crash your program. 00:11:26.460 --> 00:11:34.980 But if you get a string and then some memory that is a little more tricky, then all of a sudden you might actually be doing something like causing your program to fall over. 00:11:35.230 --> 00:11:42.720 So rust isn't bug free, but there is a category of bugs that it just doesn't let you create. 00:11:43.300 --> 00:11:53.980 And that makes it harder to compile, but a beauty to work with in the fact that a lot of the things that you might struggle with that are harder to debug are gone. 00:11:54.170 --> 00:11:54.340 Right. 00:11:54.660 --> 00:12:04.900 You know, I thought the nature of Python is the looseness of the type system and the dynamicism of it means you can get moving very, very quickly. 00:12:05.460 --> 00:12:10.620 But if you're not using a type checker, type mismatches are things you discover at runtime. 00:12:11.780 --> 00:12:15.540 All of that is very strict and very well managed in Rust. 00:12:15.700 --> 00:12:18.260 And so those kinds of problems just don't exist. 00:12:19.440 --> 00:12:20.000 That's awesome. 00:12:20.280 --> 00:12:22.680 It also takes it's also mind bending. 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:23.360 It is. 00:12:23.360 --> 00:12:24.320 In some ways, right? 00:12:24.420 --> 00:12:37.680 It's the way you think the way a lot of the ways you think about solving problems in C++ or C or Python can be kind of the same in Rust. Some of these limitations sort of change the algorithms 00:12:38.340 --> 00:12:42.620 and the data structures that will work in those worlds. Yeah. Yep. Well, and, you know, take 00:12:42.760 --> 00:12:56.320 something as simple as an integer in Python. They're boundless, right? And if you're doing certain kinds of math, that's fantastic. There's no upper limit. Python takes care of all of that for you. It figures it out. I actually saw an article a couple of weeks ago where somebody was 00:12:56.540 --> 00:13:08.700 building a SIMD machine based on integer, based on, doing bitwise operations on massive integers, right? Thousand byte integers, and you can get away with this. And Python just happily 00:13:08.860 --> 00:13:21.940 goes, yeah, that's a really big integer. No problem. Rust is closer to the machine. So it tends to use integers the way your CPU uses integers. So you have to be aware if you're using an eight bit integer that you can't put nine bits in it. 00:13:22.300 --> 00:13:22.980 Things go wrong. 00:13:23.540 --> 00:13:27.980 Now the compiler, most of the time can catch that depends on how you're getting into that situation. 00:13:28.820 --> 00:13:30.900 And so it, it stops you from doing those things. 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:33.000 But of course now you have to be conscious of it, right? 00:13:33.080 --> 00:13:35.640 You're making a decision when you're designing your program. 00:13:36.200 --> 00:13:38.120 How many bits am I going to store this in? 00:13:38.340 --> 00:13:45.460 And most of the time that's not a problem, but sometimes that might mean you're hitting boundaries that you wouldn't otherwise expect to hit. 00:13:45.660 --> 00:13:45.780 Yeah. 00:13:45.960 --> 00:13:48.360 And even weird things like it's signed or unsigned. 00:13:48.440 --> 00:13:51.000 Like now you can have negative numbers, not even negative one, not allowed. 00:13:51.340 --> 00:13:51.460 Yeah. 00:13:51.740 --> 00:13:54.160 That means 2.17, two, two, five billion. 00:13:55.639 --> 00:14:00.820 And interesting, like a lot of that stuff is in Python, but it's buried further down. 00:14:01.120 --> 00:14:07.800 So you can get at some of those same concepts inside of Python, but if you're just starting out, you don't go digging for those things. 00:14:08.120 --> 00:14:08.200 Right? 00:14:08.480 --> 00:14:20.660 So if you're, you know, if you're playing with the network and you're trying to pack bytes together, Python has signed and unsigned and it has those sides pieces. And all of that is very, very important if you're constructing the perfect 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:35.320 packet. But if you're just trying to do math on the command line, well, you don't need to think about that kind of thing. Rust doesn't give you the choice. And that's not Rust specific. That's most compiled languages. They don't give you the choice, right? And it's also where the speed comes 00:14:35.430 --> 00:14:46.780 from, right? So that beauty of Python's limitless integer means there has to be machinery inside of that to handle when you make it bigger than what the current chunk of memory is. 00:14:47.360 --> 00:14:49.260 And rust doesn't have that machinery. 00:14:49.470 --> 00:14:50.720 It just says, okay, I'll crash. 00:14:51.170 --> 00:14:53.600 and so it's, it's a trade-off, right? 00:14:53.740 --> 00:15:00.820 So you don't have to care for as much, but one of the reasons Python is slower is because there's the overhead that handles these kinds of things. 00:15:00.960 --> 00:15:03.660 So one of the reasons, you know, the flip side works as well. 00:15:03.960 --> 00:15:09.340 One of the reasons rust is faster is because it's optimizing for exactly what your CPU does. 00:15:10.040 --> 00:15:12.460 And that less overhead means your code runs faster. 00:15:12.760 --> 00:15:12.840 Right. 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:17.340 You're never going to get a Python integer into a CPU register. 00:15:17.740 --> 00:15:17.900 Right. 00:15:18.180 --> 00:15:19.860 Like it's just, I don't know. 00:15:20.779 --> 00:15:21.180 Maybe. 00:15:21.460 --> 00:15:31.240 I remember when I came to Python, I did C++ and C#, all languages that care about the shape and size of these variables, numbers, and for 15 years. 00:15:31.360 --> 00:15:34.040 And I came to Python, I'm like, I got to be doing something wrong. 00:15:34.460 --> 00:15:36.320 How do I tell it again how big the number is? 00:15:38.060 --> 00:15:41.340 Because what kind, like, is it just, is it a 64 bit? 00:15:41.540 --> 00:15:44.720 I couldn't figure out like, what is, how do I, it's going to be a problem. 00:15:44.800 --> 00:15:46.000 And then I'm like, wait, it just grows. 00:15:46.180 --> 00:15:46.640 That's crazy. 00:15:46.920 --> 00:15:47.120 Yeah. 00:15:47.440 --> 00:15:51.280 Well, I think I started with Python more as a scripting glue kind of thing. 00:15:51.700 --> 00:15:56.660 And most shell languages don't have, like Python, just don't care about those things. 00:15:56.780 --> 00:15:56.860 Right. 00:15:57.300 --> 00:16:02.120 And so when you're using it loosely to glue other things together, I don't think that really kind of ever crossed my mind. 00:16:02.220 --> 00:16:14.780 And I think I got used to the idea by that time I was doing, you know, web servers and things that were bigger, more interesting projects. And I think a lot of this is where are you coming from and how are you using the tool, right? So I think for the first couple of years I was doing 00:16:14.990 --> 00:16:28.620 Python, I was writing, you know, at max 50 or a hundred line scripts to solve some immediate little problem. And it's nice not to have to worry about that kind of thing, right? So all of this really is, you know, what is the tool and how are you using it for what you're trying to accomplish? 00:16:29.100 --> 00:16:36.880 Yeah. And I was coming from scientific programming, like building UIs and other type of tools for scientist type of thing. 00:16:38.080 --> 00:16:41.320 We care about the size of this number because science. 00:16:41.600 --> 00:16:42.580 That's all what your background is. 00:16:43.940 --> 00:16:46.260 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Sentry. 00:16:46.670 --> 00:16:48.800 You know Sentry for their great error monitoring. 00:16:49.150 --> 00:16:50.180 But let's talk about logs. 00:16:50.840 --> 00:16:51.540 Logs are messy. 00:16:52.100 --> 00:16:57.640 Trying to grep through them and line them up with traces and dashboards just to understand one issue isn't easy. 00:16:58.220 --> 00:17:00.260 Did you know that Sentry has logs too? 00:17:00.940 --> 00:17:02.880 And your logs just became way more usable. 00:17:03.440 --> 00:17:09.300 Sentry's logs are trace-connected and structured, so you can follow the request flow and filter by what matters. 00:17:09.900 --> 00:17:18.040 And because Sentry surfaces the context right where you're debugging, the trace, relevant logs, the error, and even the session replay all land in one timeline. 00:17:18.560 --> 00:17:20.640 No timestamp matching, no tool hopping. 00:17:21.240 --> 00:17:27.300 From front-end to mobile to back-end, whatever you're debugging, Sentry gives you the context you need so you can fix the problem and move on. 00:17:27.880 --> 00:17:32.559 More than 4.5 million developers use Sentry, including teams at Anthropic and Disney+. 00:17:33.020 --> 00:17:37.960 Get started with Sentry logs and error monitoring today at talkpython.fm/sentry. 00:17:38.360 --> 00:17:40.620 Be sure to use our code, Talk Python26. 00:17:41.300 --> 00:17:42.860 The link is in your podcast player's show notes. 00:17:43.360 --> 00:17:44.840 Thank you to Sentry for supporting the show. 00:17:46.380 --> 00:17:53.560 I do, before we get too much farther jumping into it, I do want to point out that you wrote the Up and Running with Rust course over at Talk Python. 00:17:53.860 --> 00:17:54.540 So thank you for that. 00:17:54.790 --> 00:17:55.900 I really enjoy this course. 00:17:56.100 --> 00:17:58.280 It's both very educational and funny. 00:17:59.140 --> 00:17:59.660 I try. 00:18:00.120 --> 00:18:00.720 Thank you for that. 00:18:00.840 --> 00:18:05.660 The beauty of doing this kind of stuff with a sense of humor is you don't actually have to be a comedian. 00:18:05.880 --> 00:18:09.780 It's not like everything is a joke, but you can stick some humor in once in a while. 00:18:10.080 --> 00:18:17.520 So I do wonder occasionally whether, again, because of the similar generation, half the jokes might have been aimed specifically at you. 00:18:17.640 --> 00:18:21.060 So just because you find it funny doesn't mean other people will. 00:18:21.500 --> 00:18:23.660 I think they will. At least the lightheartedness. 00:18:23.740 --> 00:18:24.460 We'll see what happens. 00:18:26.460 --> 00:18:27.900 We'll come back to that at the end. 00:18:28.080 --> 00:18:29.800 This is kind of not exactly the same. 00:18:29.940 --> 00:18:33.740 It's not just that we're going to turn the course in the podcast, but it's inspired some of our concepts. 00:18:34.400 --> 00:18:38.380 Now, I want to start by talking about Rust. 00:18:39.240 --> 00:18:44.500 Just some examples before we dive into how is it compared to Python. 00:18:44.860 --> 00:18:47.680 We've touched on a little bit of that, but there's a bunch of differences and so on. 00:18:48.060 --> 00:18:53.100 But let's just appreciate some of the things like Pydantic, Ruff. 00:18:53.540 --> 00:18:56.720 Give me your thoughts on the last five years of these tools. 00:18:56.900 --> 00:19:00.660 have kind of supplanted a lot of things that were very well established in Python. 00:19:01.210 --> 00:19:06.240 So there's, there's, there's kind of three ways that Rust intersects with the Python world. 00:19:06.800 --> 00:19:10.260 And one has almost nothing to do with Python. 00:19:10.680 --> 00:19:14.520 It's they've used Rust to build tools that are Python tools. 00:19:15.310 --> 00:19:19.440 The, they could have just as easily done that for any other language, right? 00:19:19.490 --> 00:19:25.840 So when you talk about things like the linters and those kinds of things, they're, they're useful because they're fast. 00:19:26.200 --> 00:19:30.100 they are not, they're not really integrating with Python. 00:19:30.400 --> 00:19:33.420 They're a third party tool that you're using to make your Python better. 00:19:33.800 --> 00:19:42.860 And I think so some of the, some of the popularity in that has come out of the fact that a lot of the tools we've been using historically in the Python world have been written in Python. 00:19:43.290 --> 00:19:45.280 And so they've been very slow. 00:19:45.720 --> 00:19:48.300 And most of the time that doesn't matter. 00:19:48.680 --> 00:19:55.440 You know, there's that, you know, that programming world of, oh, I'll just go get another cup of coffee and it'll be done when it comes back. 00:19:55.840 --> 00:20:02.120 But your world shifts when you start seeing, you know, orders of magnitude, right? 00:20:02.160 --> 00:20:10.000 Like 10% faster, you're not going to notice it when you're starting to talk multiple zeros times faster, this changes things. 00:20:10.460 --> 00:20:15.740 And I think there were a couple of key libraries that started doing this and everyone kind of went, oh, wait a second. 00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:17.580 There's some, there's some value to this. 00:20:17.940 --> 00:20:24.440 And so I think there's been this real spring up of things written in Rust that make Python development easier. 00:20:24.960 --> 00:20:33.140 Yeah, I think the one that was most stark to me was Ruff because it was just unreasonably fast. 00:20:33.320 --> 00:20:33.460 Yes. 00:20:34.540 --> 00:20:39.180 I remember running on the Talk Python training, all the courses, like that app. 00:20:39.380 --> 00:20:41.360 And that app is much bigger than people think from the outside. 00:20:41.660 --> 00:20:47.520 It's 170,000 lines of Python or something, which is not huge, but it's not a toy, right? 00:20:47.840 --> 00:20:50.960 And so I remember running Ruff on it and it goes, found these four hours. 00:20:50.980 --> 00:20:52.280 I'm like, yeah, no, you didn't. 00:20:52.280 --> 00:20:52.960 Wait, wait. 00:20:54.240 --> 00:20:57.720 Did I not tell it to like go into the subject? 00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:00.660 It's like, did you stop after you found four errors? 00:21:00.780 --> 00:21:01.360 I don't understand. 00:21:01.580 --> 00:21:02.440 How can you be finished? 00:21:02.800 --> 00:21:03.580 How can you be finished? 00:21:03.680 --> 00:21:06.640 You like literally parse the entire thing for a hundred rules. 00:21:07.140 --> 00:21:08.980 And it was like, enter answer. 00:21:09.060 --> 00:21:10.000 I'm like, what? 00:21:10.300 --> 00:21:11.140 I just don't understand. 00:21:11.760 --> 00:21:11.920 Yeah. 00:21:12.160 --> 00:21:12.400 Yeah. 00:21:12.720 --> 00:21:16.820 And then there's something different here, you know? 00:21:17.100 --> 00:21:17.240 Yep. 00:21:17.740 --> 00:21:21.180 I also, I tend to be fairly slow to upgrade my machines. 00:21:21.640 --> 00:21:27.360 So I'm often a couple of generations out processor wise, and it's just that much more, right? 00:21:27.540 --> 00:21:34.460 Because like when you're, when you're operating on a slow machine to begin with, and then you're trying to do something like lint a couple hundred thousand lines of code. 00:21:34.880 --> 00:21:35.060 Yeah. 00:21:35.160 --> 00:21:36.120 It makes a huge difference. 00:21:36.380 --> 00:21:37.200 It makes a huge difference. 00:21:37.400 --> 00:21:37.660 It does. 00:21:37.800 --> 00:21:39.840 So one of the categories is rough, which is really tooling. 00:21:39.980 --> 00:21:41.740 And you can kind of forget that it's rust. 00:21:41.880 --> 00:21:44.680 Like it just doesn't even really, it might as well have been written in some. 00:21:45.060 --> 00:21:45.480 It could have been. 00:21:46.140 --> 00:21:46.480 Yeah. 00:21:46.680 --> 00:21:49.000 And I think that's kind of the key to this category, right? 00:21:49.160 --> 00:21:53.380 whether it's written in rust or C or anything else is kind of indifferent. 00:21:53.700 --> 00:21:54.560 It's, it's a tool. 00:21:55.120 --> 00:22:02.640 they, they're particularly with things like linters, you know, the, the, description of the Python language is publicly available. 00:22:03.180 --> 00:22:08.820 There are tools out there for compiling, for compiling language parsers. 00:22:09.260 --> 00:22:23.820 So like you can, you could have taken something, else and use that to take the definition of Python and built a thing that parses Python in any other language. It's just that Rust seems to be, has, has become the thing that is now the way to 00:22:23.820 --> 00:22:32.280 do some of this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And just give like other numbers, you know, instead of my own personal example that people can't exactly relate to for parsing for linting and pars, 00:22:33.060 --> 00:22:45.140 evaluating this, the entire CPython code base from scratch is a 0.3 seconds. Yeah. That's, that's like enter the three blinks of an eye. Yeah. You know, that's pretty ridiculous. Yeah. 00:22:45.340 --> 00:22:46.200 So that's one category. 00:22:46.350 --> 00:22:50.980 The other category is closer to our hearts with things like Pydantic and so on. 00:22:51.260 --> 00:22:52.880 So like I said, there's kind of three modes. 00:22:53.680 --> 00:22:58.340 The second mode, and I think it's the most common one, is because Py... 00:22:58.510 --> 00:22:59.260 And this isn't really... 00:22:59.420 --> 00:23:01.900 Again, this is one of those things that's not quite Rust-specific. 00:23:02.380 --> 00:23:09.680 Python was designed from the get-go to integrate well with lower-level languages. 00:23:10.420 --> 00:23:18.100 And in fact, there's a good chunk of the Python standard library, which is really just a thin wrapper on top of the C standard library. 00:23:18.600 --> 00:23:21.460 And in fact, the older stuff in the standard library, you can actually see it. 00:23:21.740 --> 00:23:26.220 It's a little creaky in some of the naming and stuff before they kind of got consistent about how to name things. 00:23:26.330 --> 00:23:29.740 And you look at it and if you're a C programmer, you're just like, oh, I know exactly what that is. 00:23:29.960 --> 00:23:32.040 At least they don't use Hungarian notation. 00:23:32.460 --> 00:23:33.040 There is that. 00:23:33.320 --> 00:23:33.860 There is that. 00:23:34.120 --> 00:23:34.840 S, Z. 00:23:35.220 --> 00:23:36.740 What is going on here? 00:23:37.000 --> 00:23:41.100 So Python has been designed to be able to do this. 00:23:41.560 --> 00:23:50.620 And it just turns out that I think a lot of people are coding in rust have found it easier to code than encoding in c that same interface that c 00:23:50.900 --> 00:24:04.640 extensions can use can be used by rust and so as a result libraries like pydantic libraries like polars they have written their library in rust and then with a very very thin veneer there doesn't 00:24:04.780 --> 00:24:14.700 take it doesn't take a lot of effort to expose that up and then python inside of python you can treat that like any other python module so you don't actually have to be conscious of how they 00:24:14.720 --> 00:24:21.400 And as a result of this, you end up with a lot of speed up because you use that same speed that you were talking about with rough. 00:24:21.760 --> 00:24:26.340 But now Python, which tends to be a slower language, can now access this kind of stuff. 00:24:26.640 --> 00:24:41.460 So something like Polars or Pydantic, where you're doing a lot of crunching and you want them to be fast and performative, this marriage between the dynamic library on the hard drive that is a compiled thing as a Python module, 00:24:41.640 --> 00:24:45.040 that integration has been very, very handy. 00:24:45.420 --> 00:24:57.620 And I think this is the place where Rust is starting to shine because it's a cleaner, although it can be a little frustrating, it's a cleaner language than C. 00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:02.440 There's a learning curve, but there are a lot of things it doesn't let you do. 00:25:02.580 --> 00:25:03.720 There's fewer foot guns. 00:25:04.170 --> 00:25:09.520 And as a result, it's a nice marriage between a low-level language and some higher-level concepts, right? 00:25:09.760 --> 00:25:12.060 So it has things like iterators and collections in it. 00:25:12.380 --> 00:25:15.000 And so if you're coming from Python, that's like, oh, how do I deal with that? 00:25:15.080 --> 00:25:17.760 Oh, it's the same kind of for in loop and it's the exact same thing, right? 00:25:18.200 --> 00:25:27.100 So there's enough similarity to more modern languages that this is becoming a nice sort of collection of pieces that worked well together. 00:25:27.460 --> 00:25:31.700 And in the cases of things that need to be really fast, this is a real answer. 00:25:31.940 --> 00:25:32.900 Yeah, absolutely it is. 00:25:33.300 --> 00:25:44.200 And taking your Rust code and exposing it as a Python package with the tools like Pyotr3 maturing that we're going to talk about obviously they they make it super easy it comes down to just 00:25:44.420 --> 00:25:54.580 okay well you need to build more variants of your wheels rather than just a source only one yeah i think i have an analogy for these types of things so we have one third uh category i guess which i 00:25:54.580 --> 00:26:05.919 would put as granian and other things which is a web application server that runs that is built and runs in rust but then your code and python still runs so i have i have an analogy chris tell me what 00:26:05.880 --> 00:26:16.760 think here we've got the caramel dipped apple where it's caramel is python okay so we've got the caramel dipped apple where python is on the outside with like a rusty core 00:26:17.040 --> 00:26:29.740 yep that would be pydantic we have maybe python maybe it's the way anyway we've got Granian and other things where it's like more like a caramel m&m on the outside it's like a 00:26:30.120 --> 00:26:34.760 hard shell of rust and then the side it's like some sort of crunchy nugget on the outside and 00:26:34.780 --> 00:26:49.040 the caramel's inside yeah the protective hard outside is the rust which is granian and those types of things and then we've got the tools which i'm thinking of is just like a solid piece of caramel but that's maybe a little bit backwards i i would go with the tools are like when 00:26:49.160 --> 00:26:58.840 you've got a slices of apples and a bowl of caramel that you can dip it in so it's a separate thing but you can mix and match so yeah i think we're stretching we're officially stretching this 00:26:59.020 --> 00:27:05.560 analogy and now i'm hungry but i know i know we were stretching but with your your slices of apple You've, you've perfected it. 00:27:05.670 --> 00:27:05.800 Okay. 00:27:06.060 --> 00:27:11.380 So yeah, so that third category is within rust code, you can embed the Python interpreter. 00:27:11.960 --> 00:27:18.180 And so from a rust, program, you can now use an access Python. 00:27:18.590 --> 00:27:32.500 So you can kind of use Python as a scripting or, or configuration language within a larger, mechanism and something like granian where you want to actually run Python code for a web framework, that, you know, so that, 00:27:32.520 --> 00:27:43.960 that inverts the relationship we were talking about before. So yeah, so that's our three, right? So it's separate tools, the using Rust as a module inside of Python. And then the third one 00:27:43.960 --> 00:27:51.080 is using Python as a compiled library, using the interpreter as a compiled library inside of the 00:27:51.140 --> 00:28:02.760 Rust object itself. Yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well. Let's talk differences. I think kind of language differences, you know, syntax differences. It feels pretty familiar, honestly. 00:28:03.320 --> 00:28:16.640 Yeah. And I was about to say, you know, to start with differences, it might actually be easier to start with what's not different. The language itself, there are some things, obviously, if you've never, if you've never seen it before, it takes a little, and that's the same with any language, 00:28:17.220 --> 00:28:27.500 but it's not going to be completely out of nowhere. If, if I hand a Python developer some fairly clean Rust, you're probably going to have an idea of what it's doing. The loop mechanisms are the same. 00:28:27.980 --> 00:28:33.660 The if else is similar. There's no L if you actually use if else. I always scratched my head 00:28:33.780 --> 00:28:37.680 with L if in Python. I never understood it. Why you need a new keyword. It's such a verbose language. 00:28:37.900 --> 00:28:41.760 And then it's like, well, no, this we're going to. Yes. Yeah. Why that one? I have a sneaking 00:28:42.180 --> 00:28:52.680 suspicion. It might've made something early in the early days easier to parse, but rather than parsing two keywords, it gives you a keyword. A lot of the built-in mechanisms, like it's got 00:28:52.840 --> 00:29:07.700 tuples and arrays, it's got iterables and collections. So a lot of the declaration looks like typed Python. So because it is a strictly typed language and you have to specify what everything is, you do have things like the arrow that this function returns something of this 00:29:07.880 --> 00:29:19.300 type, right? So you've got that little arrow designator. But if you're used to coding in typed python which i'm not uh then you uh then then it's readable from that perspective it is yeah 00:29:19.430 --> 00:29:31.800 the types are quite quite similar uh as they you know um for the way you define them right if you have like a function or something then you just say like arrow goes to i always read that as goes 00:29:31.800 --> 00:29:38.200 to pool if it like returns a pool the variables are variable name colon type right yeah yeah and 00:29:38.220 --> 00:29:43.060 And I suspect that's probably because Python type libraries was inspired by some of this stuff. 00:29:43.180 --> 00:29:47.400 I think it probably flowed the other direction, but I'm not sure about that. 00:29:47.680 --> 00:29:55.080 So yeah, it's a lot of mixing in this, in the later, the things that got created later and typed later, like TypeScript is similar. 00:29:55.600 --> 00:29:55.800 Yes. 00:29:56.120 --> 00:29:57.560 Python types are similar. 00:29:58.360 --> 00:29:59.200 Swift is similar. 00:29:59.800 --> 00:30:05.460 I think it's the same that everybody stole from C, you know, C is the granddaddy of most of the languages we use. 00:30:05.560 --> 00:30:08.480 And then I think people started adding these kinds of concepts to it. 00:30:08.580 --> 00:30:12.100 And it's like, well, if you've come from that other language, this makes it simple. 00:30:12.400 --> 00:30:17.120 So yeah, there seems to be a sort of family of how this stuff works now. 00:30:17.440 --> 00:30:17.540 Yeah. 00:30:17.600 --> 00:30:19.220 And someone decided all the types go after. 00:30:19.680 --> 00:30:19.840 Yes. 00:30:20.200 --> 00:30:20.280 Right. 00:30:20.520 --> 00:30:22.740 And see, you would say like int function. 00:30:23.240 --> 00:30:23.320 Yeah. 00:30:23.440 --> 00:30:26.200 That, that, that has taken me a little bit to get used to. 00:30:26.500 --> 00:30:26.580 Yes. 00:30:27.340 --> 00:30:36.840 I presume it me it's meant to be making it more readable and you see the essence, like the function name and the variable names, and then the stuff describes it after. 00:30:37.180 --> 00:30:38.440 But yeah, it's always caught me off guard. 00:30:38.560 --> 00:30:40.300 I'm guessing it's because it's optional. 00:30:40.960 --> 00:30:43.820 It's optional in Python, but it's not optional in Rust. 00:30:44.220 --> 00:30:44.440