User Guide

The user guide details every single feature Pydust offers. All code snippets are taken from our example/ directory and are tested during CI.

If you do struggle or find any issues with the examples, please do let us know!

Conventions

Pydust maintains a consistent set of conventions around structs, function naming, and memory management to assist with development.

Conversion Functions

When converting from Python to Zig types:

• .as(T, anytype) - return a view of the object as the given type. This will leave the refcnt of the original object untouched.

When creating Python types from Zig types:

• .create(anytype) - create a new Python object from a Zig type. Zig slices are copied.
• PyFoo.checked(py.PyObject) - checks a PyObject is indeed a PyFoo before wrapping it up as one.
• PyFoo.unchecked(py.PyObject) - wraps a PyObject as a PyFoo without checking the type.

Type Conversions

At comptime, Pydust wraps your function definitions such that native Zig types can be accepted or returned from functions and automatically converted into Python objects.

Zig Primitives

Zig Type	Python Type
void	None
bool	bool
i32, i64	int
u32, u64	int
f32, f64	float
struct	dict
tuple struct	tuple
[]const u8	str
*[_]u8	str

Slices (e.g. []const u8 strings) cannot be returned from Pydust functions since Pydust has no way to deallocate them after they're copied into Python.

Slices can be taken as arguments to a function, but the bytes underlying that slice are only guaranteed to live for the duration of the function call. They should be copied if you wish to extend the lifetime.

Pydust Objects

Pointers to any Pydust Zig structs will convert to their corresponding Python instance.

For example, given the class Foo below, if the class is initialized with const foo: *Foo = py.init(Foo, .{}), then a result of foo will be wrapped into the corresponding Python instance of Foo.

const Foo = py.class(struct { a: u32 = 0 });

pub fn create_foo() *const Foo {
    return py.init(Foo, .{});
}

Pydust Type Wrappers

The Pydust Python type wrappers convert as expected.

Zig Type	Python Type
py.PyObject	object
py.PyBool	bool
py.PyBytes	bytes
py.PyLong	int
py.PyFloat	float
py.PyTuple	tuple
py.PyDict	dict
py.PyString	str