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Python to Rust: Breaking Down 3 Big Obstacles

Python pro to Rust rookie ā€” a data scientistā€™s transition tale

Dennis Bakhuis
TDS Archive
8 min readDec 12, 2023

Figure 1: The snake and the crab. (Crab: Romina BM; Snake: Mohan Moolepetlu; composition by author).

Everybody around me knows that I am a big fan of šŸ Python. I started using Python about 15 years ago when I was fed up with Mathworks Matlab. While the idea of Matlab seemed nice, after mastering Python I never looked back. I even became a sort of evangelist of Python at my University and ā€œspread the wordā€.

The ability to code does not make you a software developer.

At my current employer TenneT, a large transmission system operator in the Netherlands and Germany, we are building a document parsing and validation solution with a team of about 10 people. Building such a solution, especially in a team, is much harder than I thought. This also made me more interested in proper paradigms of software engineering. I always thought that my code is not too bad, but after looking at work from my software engineer friends: man there is so much to learn!

As I learned about topics like strong typing, SOLID principles, and general programming architectures, I also glanced at other languages and how they solved the problem. Especially Rust caught my eye as I often saw Python packages that were based on Rust (e.g. Polars).

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TDS Archive
TDS Archive

Published in TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

Dennis Bakhuis
Dennis Bakhuis

Written by Dennis Bakhuis

Data Scientist with a passion for natural language processing and deep learning. Python and open source enthusiast. Background in fluid dynamics.

Responses (10)

What are your thoughts?

Nice reading indeed āœļøšŸ¤Œ

I really enjoyed your article and can relate, Howe youā€™re obviously more advanced in your rust journey!

I liked the insights given by sharing your personal experience and perspective using Rust. I found that much more insightful and than the usualā€¦

Really nice article. We are trying to educate our graduates using Rust for their spatial data science workflows. We want to create carbon effective software using Rust for production and Python for prototyping. Thanks for sharing.