Abstract
Ever tried optimizing a slow Python application and thought: “Oh! I wish I could just write this bit it in Rust”? Well, turns out you can! Let’s discuss why Rust is a better choice than C, how to use Rust to make your apps lightning fast and how to get away with it; without your users even noticing.
As Infrastructure Engineers at Yelp, the challenge we face everyday is: scale. Yelp is mostly a Python shop, so our work often revolves around making Python applications run faster. Until now, we have been using different techniques: faster interpreters, or, more often, C code.
Given its safety guarantees, performance and promise of better tooling than C, we decided we had to give Rust a try. The initial results helped reinforce that there was a lot of opportunity for Rust to play an important role in our production code.
Yelp heavily relies on the Apache Avro serialization format for its internal infrastructure. During the talk, we will show how we implemented avro-rs, an Avro serialization/deserialization library in Rust, how we were able to call it from Python (and in theory from any other language) with very little code, using tools such as cbindgen, CFFI and Milksnake.
This talk would outline how easy it is to write interoperable code in a performant language like Rust and why a company should invest in Rust, over the many other available alternatives, to run production services.
