Presentation: Accelerating Performance by Incrementally Integrating Rust Into Existing Codebase
Lily Mara explains how to avoid high-risk software rewrites through incremental FFI refactoring. She shares how engineering teams can replace Python bottlenecks with Rust via PyO3, demonstrating how to achieve dramatic function-level speedups, seamless integration testing, and meaningful infrastructure cost savings without microservice overhead. By Lily Mara
Lily Mara, a staff engineer at Discord, is presenting a talk on accelerating performance by incrementally integrating Rust into existing codebases. She explains how engineering teams can replace Python bottlenecks with Rust using PyO3, achieving dramatic function-level speedups, seamless integration testing, and meaningful infrastructure cost savings without the overhead of microservices.
Mara is a staff engineer at Discord, has been using Rust for over a decade, and authored the book Refactoring to Rust. The talk focuses on FFI refactoring, which involves rewriting specific functionality from one programming language to another, in this case, Python to Rust, and connecting them using the C Foreign Function Interface (FFI).
This technique is not new and has been utilized in various software applications, such as NumPy, SciPy, and TensorFlow.
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