Rust in the data science and machine learning stack (talk)

In May 2025, I had the pleasure to give a presentation at the PyData Zurich meetup, Rust in the data science and machine learning stack.

Picture courtesy of Kevin Klein.

After introducing the role of compiled languages in the Python ecosystem, the talk gave a short presentation of the Rust programming language (partly adapted from an earlier talk), before analyzing some success stories: ruff, uv, polars, pydantic and tokenizers.
Then, a toy Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizer was used to illustrate the port of a Python implementation to Rust (including the creation of bindings) and the outcomes on performance. The code of the two implementations is available in a small Github repository.

See PDF (50 pages) or below for the slides, authored in Typst.

See also

• The introductory talk about Rust from January 2024.
• The talk about async Rust from November 2023.