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Rust for Numerical Programming

I have not tried Rust before, but after the news about Carbon from Google began circulating, I was interested
in knowing whether that language is fit for numerical programming, with more flexibility and memory safety. I
am not a computer science professional or programmer in the sense of the backend professionals etc. Just use
programming languages for numerical calculations and simulations in Physics.

Looking around for Carbon (there wasn't much about numerical programming), I came across Rust a couple of
times. At some point, there was this paper comparing different languages for "carbon footprint" or efficiency
metric of some sort. C was at top, of course, with a metric of "1" (maybe the reference metric for all other
languages). Rust was at 1.03. Every other language came after that, and the "high level" languages like Python,
MATLAB, Java, all had double-digit metrics. So very slow/inefficient/large carbon footprint.

Is Rust "easy" to code in, as in Python? Or does it have a well-developed suite of libraries for numerical
computations (e.g. Linear Algebra, Integration, Optimisation, Parallelisation, GPU/CUDA support)? Will it be

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mbecks • hace 1 a

The numerical ecosystem isn't as advanced as python. There are still some good numerics crates, but
whether you could easily port your projects from python depends on the python tools you are using and
whether you could find a suitable replacement. I know that there are plenty of crates relating to physics
simulation to check out. Some of them can be pretty hard to use / find good enough examples for so it
usually takes more time than it would for python.

In terms of ease, you do have to think about memory management more when coding in rust. On the plus
side you have more control over how the application handles multithreading, and basic multithreading is
made pretty easy. Also things that compile tend to work, and when they don't compile the message is
usually helpful. I remember in the beginning, some seemed cryptic but then there's google.

good luck and happy programming

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attofreak • hace 1 a

Thanks, that was quick and answered all my questions. I guess I should stick to Python, there is not
much time with projects to spend on a new language. I might have to deal with C++ for gaining speed
when needed (Cython etc.), and that is already extra work enough. Maybe Rust will become more
useful to user-side numerical programming in coming years.

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jpet • hace 1 a

I've done lots of numerical programming in C++ and Python, and some in Rust.

Pros:

The language is excellent for writing high-performance code, including numerical libraries.
Some excellent libraries like nalgebra
Library ecosystem works much better than in C++. If you want to use a third-party dependency, just
use it. Vs. C++ where no matter how sophisticated the library is, it's often easier to just rewrite it
yourself than get another third-party dependency working.
Libraries are also more interoperable, partly due the community (e.g. lib authors agreeing on
common shared libs for basic vocabulary types), and partly due to the language ( transmute , similar
to C++'s reinterpret_cast , allows you to legally cast e.g. &lib1:Mat4x4 to &lib2:Mat4x4 , as
long as the layouts match. In C++ that's undefined behavior, so using multiple libs often means a
bunch of expensive conversions that are semantically no-ops but can't be removed).
Rust's lifetime system isn't just for memory safety! It also helps avoid bugs when you're using e.g.
lots of views into matrices, and don't want to accidentally change the data out from underneath.

Cons:

Still not as many third-party numerics libs as C++, and *way* fewer than Python.
Rust makes the syntax clunky compared to either C++ (e.g. with Eigen or Ceres) or Python (numpy et
al). Your code will be littered with clone() calls, array indexing is too limited (by the language) to
return things like submatrix views so you can't have nice syntax like numpy, etc.
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attofreak • hace 1 a

Thanks for your input, it always helps to know more from someone with a lot of experience. I will keep
watching how Rust community evolves, it seems very promising and a good middle ground between
C/C++ and Python. Will have to get rid of the clunky syntax!

There was this article, talking about Rust as a numerical programming tool, and it says something
peculiar:

You can’t use Rust arrays to represent a matrix bigger than 4x8, how useful is that?

It seems to be related to this clone() call, and clone -ing arrays is a very difficult/complicated
process?

Python modules seem to work very well with each other. At least the big ones, numpy , scipy ,
pandas , stats , cupy even (with special functions to convert to/from numpy arrays). If I combine
that with Cython and jit-type vectorisation, will it be sufficient enough? Or is C++ something one
should fall back on, when looking for efficient/high speed numerical computing? We are reaching limits
with Python, takes days sometimes (even with numpy/cupy), so I have been wondering if it would help
to finally move to C++, or wrestle with Cython directly?
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g4nt1 • hace 1 a

I’d look into https://dimforge.com/

Clearly harder to get started than the much more mature python numerical programming ecosystem
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[eliminado] • hace 1 a

So you can contextualize my answer/opinion (take it with a grain of salt): I have 10 years of experience in
Python and Matlab, ~3 years of experience with C/C++, and a few weeks of experience with Rust.

It feels to me like coding in Rust is about as "hard" as C or C++. Probably easier than C++ because you
don't have 30 years of conflicting standards/versions all stacked on top of each other and used in hideous
combination in the same codebase (cough cough openfoam). You definitely will not find it "easy" to
migrate py3 codebases to Rust. In many cases it would be impossible without re-implementing a bunch of
python packages you are using - in most cases for numerical programming, an enormous undertaking.

With respect to the carbon footprint of Python vs C vs Rust: if you are using Python properly you are
doing most of your computations within some other library that is most likely written in C. For example if
you'e using numpy and you vectorize your operations properly, and you aren't implementing algorithms
yourself in standard Python, you're effectively "using C" but with a Python wrapper. So from a carbon
footprint perspective you should think about how much of your computations are actually being done "by
Python" vs by a package that is mostly a C extension. Your programs probably are not actually 100x less
efficient than they would be if you reimplemented everything in C, and if they are, likely you could reduce
your carbon footprint by optimizing your Python code with a much better "ROI" than by fully migrating to
C or Rust.
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attofreak • hace 1 a

I try to be as "Pythonic" as I can. Sometimes have to use for loops, but I try to parallelise those in
multiprocessing too, where possible. With the decorators from Cython, I can perhaps further cut
down time wasted in checking data types. Python is pretty great in simplifying the clutter of low-level
programming languages.
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