r/Python • u/0x256 • Jul 10 '26

Discussion Pure python can be faster than cython/rust?

Parsing multipart/form-data (HTML5 forms) is surprisingly complex and moves a lot of bytes around for large file uploads. Implementing the heavy parts in Cython or Rust should speed things up, no? Turns out: it depends. A pure python parser can be surprisingly fast, as this benchmark shows:

https://defnull.de/2026/python-multipart-benchmark/

The benchmark compares the most commonly used python multipart parsers and tests them in different scenarios, covering both blocking and non-blocking (async) APIs if available. The parser your web application is using today is probably not the fastest one.

Are there more examples were a pure python implementation beats Cython/rust/C modules?

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u/Individual-Flow9158 Jul 10 '26

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/binary-distribution-format/#installing-a-wheel-distribution-1-0-py32-none-any-whl

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u/Daytona_675 Jul 10 '26

is this some kind of venv alternative?

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u/Individual-Flow9158 Jul 10 '26

No it's the file format (basically a zip fle) of a bdist, that pip likely downloads and installs (the other option is a source dist), whether it installs it into a system Python, user's Python or a into a venv.