What attracts Python developers to Rust? Rust may seem like an odd choice as a Pythonista’s second language. Python is a very high-level language, with dynamic typing and garbage collection. Rust on the other hand has strict typing and requires the developer to give much more thought to memory handling.

So why Rust? For me, it offers something which Python doesn’t - the performance of a compiled, non-gc language - while still appealing to the same ideals that I appreciate within Python and the Python community. Despite being compiled, Rust manages to provide many of the high-level constructs that Python programmers will be used to - iterators for example. I find that Rust shares many of the goals of Python; programmer productivity and a pragmatism in design choices. For these reasons, I have found the Rust community to be a good “fit”, in the same way that Python was when I first picked it up.

Not only that, but it’s becoming easier and easier to integrate the two languages. Rust’s lack of garbage collection is useful if you’re developing Python extensions. You can find a few different methods of integation, including PyO3 - which binds directly to the CPython API (meaning it wouldn’t work so well with PyPy for example), and milksnake which uses CFFI to bind to a rust-built dynamic library.

Take this example of iterating over a range, and printing the values; first in Python:

def main():
  for i in range(10):
    print("Number {}".format(i))

And then in Rust:

fn main() {
  for i in 0..10 {
    println!("Number {}", i);
  }
}

Easy! Obviously that’s a silly, simple example. But it serves to highlight that Rust and Python aren’t so far apart, even thought their methods are different.