I don't disagree at all Josh but I also don't view the two approaches as contradictory. I would certainly expect that any Rust work we did for the Python driver should transfer very naturally over to a Rust core when we get to that point. The Python driver uses a combination of C and cython for a fair number of things (including type serde and eval of row data). These are things we would need in a common Rust core and I would absolutely expect that any impl we come up with for these things would transfer easily. Perhaps more importantly I would argue this allows us to work on a Rust implementation incrementally; it would be nice to be able to tackle chunks of the core (and get them out in the wild where we can validate them with real-world use cases) without waiting for the whole core to be complete.
This change also has significant benefits for the Python driver as it stands now; moving the current cython & C code into a common framework (and updating it) will be of considerable utility to the driver going forward. But this shouldn't get in the way of any effort to move to a common core. - Bret - On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 8:52 AM Josh McKenzie <[email protected]> wrote: > From a general philosophical perspective, I think the health of our > ecosystem would be better served by having one core natively compiled > driver lib and then language ecosystem native wrappers around that core. > Similarly to how the Swift driver wraps the C++ driver. Lowering the amount > of engineering required to keep multiple language ecosystem drivers in > parity is a big win as the ecosystem's currently pretty fragmented. > > Using rust for the core of that given its memory safety, concurrency > correctness, performance, language interconnect ecosystem, and general > zeitgeist makes a lot of sense to me. > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2026, at 2:21 PM, Bret McGuire wrote: > > Greetings all! > > Another one that seemed worthwhile to bring to the list. I've just > filed CASSPYTHON-8 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSPYTHON-8> to > explore the idea of replacing our current C and cython code with equivalent > Rust implementations. This technique is becoming more common in the Python > world but there are concrete benefits for us on the Python driver team. > There's some discussion about these benefits on CASSPYTHON-8. > > Our upcoming release (likely 3.30.0) will be intended to get an > ASF-branded Python driver out into the wild so I'm not planning on tackling > any work in this area then. The plan would be to start with this effort > for 3.31.0. We'll start with something small, just to try out the > mechanism for integrating Rust code into a Python project, and see where > that takes us. > > Thanks! > > - Bret - > > >
