RustPython VS pyodide

Interesting proposal, but with severe risks: becoming dependent on a single specific compiler and rustc could include malicious code that isn’t obvious to an outside auditor. See https://aeb.win.tue.nl/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html Ken Thompson demonstrated this.

But what will the future of RustPython be? https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython/

Major shifts like this are complex, not so only from a technical perspective but even more because a lot of humans with different opinions are involved. But radical changes are sometimes needed to be innovative again.

I have been experimenting with WebAssembly/Wasi over the last couple of years and decided it would be time to have another look and see what the state of things is. I it would be interesting to try and embed python in a wasm component for its nice sandbox properties.

There's a super cool project https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython which is a python interpreter in rust which can compile to wasip2 so I hooked that up and it seems to work well.

Its easy to build wasi components in rust now with the wasip2 target, excited to see where things head over the next few years.

Totally agree, the FFI escape hatch and excellent tooling from rust, maturin pyo3 etc means so many python problems can just be solved with rust. Which begs the question, has anyone tried doing a greenthread implementation in rust? Maybe offload some of the dynamically evaled python code to a seperate process maybe with https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython

RustPython

RustPython – Python Interpreter written in Rust

Integrating Rust into Python, Edward Wright, 2021-04-12 Examples for making rustpython run actual python code Calling Rust from Python using PyO3 Writing Python inside your Rust code — Part 1, 2020-04-17 RustPython, RustPython Rust for Python developers: Using Rust to optimize your Python code PyO3 (Rust bindings for Python) Musing About Pythonic Design Patterns In Rust, Teddy Rendahl, 2023-07-14

I tracked it down to this PR from September 2022, so it's been around for a while: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/pull/2976

Pyodide has numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas, and as of last month, even polars. https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/pull/5282

Pyodide is far from a perfect CPython and even the packages it includes often have limitations you won't find when running natively. But there's definitely enough here to be interesting and even somewhat useful. Here's an interactive app written on Pyodide that uses astropy, numpy, and matplotlib: https://shinylive.io/py/examples/#orbit-simulation

We evaluated the pyodide ecosystem for louie.ai last year and too much didn't work, eg, we couldn't get data in for arrow or parquet, which are table stakes for python data work

My guess was 2025 would be more practical for these libs ... And behold: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/2933

Very cool to see!

Compiling Fortran to WebAssembly is still an area of active development (see 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). At the time of this post, a common approach is to use f2c to compile Fortran to C and then to perform a separate compilation step to convert C to WebAssembly. However, this approach is problematic as f2c only fully supports Fortran 77, and the generated code requires extensive patching. Work is underway to develop an LLVM-based Fortran compiler, but gaps and complex toolchains remain.

Very cool! Kind of seems like a relic at this point though, cool for studying but probably better to use Pyodide [1] in practice? This is what powers JupyterLite [2], which is a fully fledged Jupyter IDE with support for packages, in browser.

1: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide

2: https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite

We implemented an in-browser Python editor/interpreter built on Pyodide over at Comet (our users are data scientists who need to build custom visualizations quite often, and the most familiar language for most of them is Python).

One of the issues you'll run into is that Pyodide only works by default with packages that have pure Python wheels available. The team has developed support for some libraries with C dependencies (like scikit-learn, I believe), but frameworks like PyTorch are particularly thorny (see this issue: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1625 )

We ended up rolling out a new version of our Python visualizations that runs off-browser, in order to support enough libraries/get the performance we need: https://www.comet.com/docs/v2/guides/comet-ui/experiment-man...

Thank you! Yes, one of the items in the Roadmap is support for Pyodide (https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide) for running in-browser python on the results of each of the code blocks! This should allow most ML libs to be usable in-browser! This is pretty high-up on our priority list.

If I understand correctly, WASM only makes sense for compiled languages, you can run the python interpreter in WASM of course[1], but that will be at a significant performance disadvantage to the native javascript interpreter, and it's also something that has to be loaded every time you load the website.

[1]: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide

If you absolutely need something comparable to Sympy, then one option might be to figure out how to best call Sympy from Rust. e.g. - RustPython, although it seems like Sympy isn't supported yet - Pyodide, and figuring out how to run it outside of a web browser. Probably also not very easy. - PyPy, and having a pretty simple Python binary for every platform - ...