DEPRECATED

This project is (temporarily) deprecated in favour of milksnake.

Milksnake lets you do the same thing as snaek but does it on a lower level so that (until we can generate significantly higher level bindings to Python) we put more controls in the hands of the developer.

Snaek is a Python library that helps you build Rust libraries and bridge them to Python with the help of cffi.

There are already other projects that make Python and Rust play along but this one is different. Unlike other projects that build Python extension modules the goal of this project is to build regular Rust libraries that are then loaded with CFFI at runtime. The advantage of this is that it does not link against libpython which means that you only need to build a handful of Python wheels to cover all platforms you care about.

In particular you will most likely only need two wheels for Linux, one for macs and soon one for Windows independently of how many Python interpreters you want to target.

• Platforms: Linux, Mac (Windows later)
• setuptools commands: bdist_wheel, build, build_ext, develop
• pip install --editable .
• Universal wheels (PACKAGE-py2.py3-none-PLATFORM.whl); this can be disabled with snaek_universal=False in setup() in case the package also contains stuff that does link against libpython.

This is what a setup.py file looks like:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='example',
    version='0.0.1',
    packages=['example'],
    zip_safe=False,
    platforms='any',
    setup_requires=['snaek'],
    install_requires=['snaek'],
    snaek_rust_modules=[
        ('example._native', 'rust/'),
    ]
)

You then need a rust/ folder that has a Rust library (with a crate type of cdylib) and a example/ python package.

Example example/__init__.py file:

from example._native import ffi, lib


def test():
    return lib.a_function_from_rust()

And a rust/src/lib.rs:

#[no_mangle]
pub unsafe extern "C" fn a_function_from_rust() -> i32 {
    42
}