Author: Alyssa Coghlan
Created at: 2025-11-19 06:59
Number: 130
Clean content: I’ll chime in with a +1 on the idea of allowing Rust extension modules, -1 (at least for now) for the core interpreter and compiler (which is already the direction the descoped PEP has moved in). For the core interpreter (at least the part which needs to be built in order for CPython to freeze its own frozen standard library modules), I think the bootstrapping and long tail platform support concerns are significant enough to at least postpone consideration of the possibility, and potentially even enough to block it forever. For extension modules manipulating untrusted input data, I see huge potential value in having access to Rust as a fast low overhead statically typed language with rich data structures and implicitly thread local data access. (For a concrete example of that from nearly 10 years ago, here’s a Sentry post about migrating their JavaScript source map processing from Python to Rust , and the benefits of not incurring the per-instance overhead of creating full Python objects). There are some cases where platform compatibility may still be a concern, but extension modules will have more options for handling that than the core interpreter does.
