Feature: Python+Rust (for example, via PyO3)

[rutrum]

For computationally complex operations, often its impractical to write some things in pure python. But having python bindings to act as glue, or to integrate with a not-so-computationally-intensive code is helpf. Thats the usecase for building a rust library and generating a python module using PyO3.

Is it in the spirit of temper to eventually (long in the future Im sure) have an alternative build path for python that permits python-friendly bindings but with compiled/native code? I think the python+rust story is common, but you could generalize this to any kind of C library that get called from a higher level language's FFI.

Would this pattern ever been an interest to the project? If you happen to write something compitational complex in temper, I can see just moving it to native python might be impractical, preventing the idea of easily making bindings in every language.

[tjpalmer]

Yes, we're very interested in doing something along these lines although maybe not with with Py03.

See #242 for some related thoughts. Our main idea is to make a standard C ABI for all Temper backend languages that support that well, primarily Rust, C++, and C itself. Then you could use any of these backends as the supporting language for a C ABI which we can then use in Python or Lua or others where this is appropriate.

And Python is definitely the biggest use case for this, since it's extremely common to use native code to speed up Python (vs say, Java, where it's far less common).

I haven't used Py03, although I know it aims for ease of use and nice Rust integration. The reason for not using it is so we can focus on what works well for matching existing Temper-built Python translations and using the common C ABI we'd like to make.

[tjpalmer]

We just haven't worked much on this because of limited resources. If you'd like to run with this yourself, let us know, and we can discuss plans and give some pointers.

[tjpalmer]

And @ShawSumma has also worked on native Python code compilation through mypyc, given our generated static type annotations, but we expect better performance from custom work attaching Python to Temper-built C++ and/or Rust.