# Cross Language Integration

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## Jupyter and multiple Languages¶

Note: This has been written as a notebook so you can download it to run it yourself using jupyter or nteract, view it on GitHub, or on nbviewer if you prefer the classical notebook rendering. It originally should have appeared on my blog.

I would be happy to know if you can get it to work on binder.

[UPDATE]

Thanks to Michael Pacer for copy-editting this. Also note that this notebook is basedaround multiple example that have been written by various people across many years.

An often requested feature for the Jupyter Notebook is the ability to have multiple kernels, often in many languages, for a single notebook.

While the request in spirit is a perfectly valid one, it is often a misunderstanding of what having a single kernel means. In particular having multiple language is often easier if you have a single process which handle the dispatching of various instructions to potentially multiple underlying languages. It is possible to do that in a Single Kernel which does orchestrate dispatching instruction and moving data around.

Whether the multiple languages that get orchestrated together are remote processes, or simply library calls or more complex mechanisms becomes an implementation detail.

Python is known to be a good "glue" language, and over the year the IPython kernel have seen a growing number of extensions showing that dynamic cross language integration can be seamless form the point of view of the user.

In the following we only scratch the surface of what is possible across a variety of languages. The approach shown here is one among many. The Calysto organisation for example has several projects taking different approaches on the problem.

In the following I will show a quick overview on how you can in single notebook interact with many languages, via subprocess call (Bash, Ruby), Common Foreign function interface (C, Rust, Fortran, ...), or even crazier approaches (Julia).

## IPython and cross language integration¶

The rest of this is mostly a demo on how cross-language integration works in a Jupyter notebook by using the features of the Reference IPython Kernel implementation. These features are completely handled in the kernel so need to be reimplemented on a per-kernel basis. Though they also work on pure terminal IPython, nbconvert or any other programmatic use of IPython.

Most of what you will see here are just thin wrappers around already existing libraries. These libraries (and their respective authors) do all the heavy lifting. I just show how seamless a cross language environment can be from the user point of view. The installation of these library might not be easy either and getting all these language to play together can be complex task. It is though becoming easier and easier.

The term just does not imply that the wrappers are simple, or easy to write. It indicate that the wrappers are far from being complete. What is shown here is completely doable using standard Python syntax and bit of manual work. SO what you'll see here is mostly convenience.

#### The good old example of Fibonacci¶

Understanding the multiple languages themselves is not necessary; most of the code here should self explanatory and straightforward. We'll define many function that compute the nth Fibonacci number more or less efficiently. We'll define them either using the classic recursive implementation, or sometime using an unrolled optimized version. As a reminder the Fibonacci sequence is defines a the following:

$$F_n = \begin{cases} 1 &\mbox{if } n \leq 2 \\ F_{n-1}+F_{n-2} & \mbox{otherwise }\end{cases}$$

The fact that we calculate the Fibonacci sequence as little importance, except that the value of $F_n$ can grow really fast in $O(e^n)$ if I remember correctly. And the recursive implementation will have a hard time getting beyond (n=100) as the number of call will be greater than $O(e^n)$ as well. Be careful especially if you calculate $F_{F_n}$ or more composition. Remembering that n=5 is stable via $F$ might be useful.

Here are the first terms of the Fibonacci sequence:

1. 1
2. 1
3. 1+1 = 2
4. 2+1 = 3
5. 3+2 = 5
6. 5+3 = 8
7. 8+5 = 13 ...

## Basic Python cross-language integration¶

In [1]:
import sys
sys.version_info

Out[1]:
sys.version_info(major=3, minor=5, micro=2, releaselevel='final', serial=0)

Python offer many facilities to call into other languages, whether we "shell-out" or use the C-API. The easiest for the end user is often to use subprocess , with the recently added run command. Though it might be annoying to define all foreign code in strings and calling the subprocess run function manually.

This is why in the following you will see 2 constructs:

optional_python_lhs = %language (language RHS expression)

As well as

%%language --cli like arguments
A block:
containing expressions and statement
from another:
language

IPython define these which are called Magics. A single percent : %something for line magics, act only on the rest of the line, and cells magics (start with %%)

One example of line magic is %timeit, which runs the following statement multiple time to get statistics about runtime:

In [2]:
%timeit [x for x in range(1000)]

10000 loops, best of 3: 34.9 µs per loop


### Streamlining calling subprocess¶

The IPython team special cased a couple of these for foreign languages, here ruby. We define the fibonacci function, compute the 15th value, print it to standard out from Ruby, and capture the value variable in the python fib15.

In [3]:
%%ruby --out fib15
def fibonacci( n )
return  n  if ( 0..1 ).include? n
( fibonacci( n - 1 ) + fibonacci( n - 2 ) )
end
puts fibonacci( 15 )

In [4]:
fib15

Out[4]:
'610\n'

Now from with Python we can do a crude parsing of the previous string output, and get the value of Fibonacci of 15.

In [5]:
int(fib15.strip())

Out[5]:
610

Ok, that's somewhat useful, but not really that much. It's convenient for self contain code. You cannot pass variable in... or can't you ?

#### Send variables in¶

Calling subprocess can be quite cumbersome when working interactively, we saw above that %% cells-magics can be of help, but you might want to shell out in the middle of a python function. Let's create a bunch of random file-names and fake some subprocess operations with it.

In [6]:
import random
import string

def rand_names(k=10,l=10):
for i in range(k):
yield '_' + ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for i in range(l))+'.o'


The !something expression is – for the purpose of these demo – equivalent to %sh something $variable where $variable is looked up in locals() and replaced by it's __repr__

In [7]:
for f in rand_names():
print('creating file',f)
!touch $f  creating file _XiKZxtsLwX.o creating file _DKCjzvlTuF.o creating file _ShTGoJMxCp.o creating file _nbockcrTbT.o creating file _cZnVpuYsxJ.o creating file _UYxnHlwJwy.o creating file _fxoVMPQbJV.o creating file _wJJUbrPzpq.o creating file _ngMMBxaDkG.o creating file _uKbssAzHBP.o  In [8]: ls -1 *.o  _DKCjzvlTuF.o _ShTGoJMxCp.o _UYxnHlwJwy.o _XiKZxtsLwX.o _cZnVpuYsxJ.o _fxoVMPQbJV.o _nbockcrTbT.o _ngMMBxaDkG.o _uKbssAzHBP.o _wJJUbrPzpq.o  We can as well get values back using the ! syntax In [9]: files = !ls *.o files  Out[9]: ['_DKCjzvlTuF.o', '_ShTGoJMxCp.o', '_UYxnHlwJwy.o', '_XiKZxtsLwX.o', '_cZnVpuYsxJ.o', '_fxoVMPQbJV.o', '_nbockcrTbT.o', '_ngMMBxaDkG.o', '_uKbssAzHBP.o', '_wJJUbrPzpq.o'] In [10]: !rm -rf *.{o,c,so} Cargo.* src target  (Who said I was going to use rust-lang.org later ?) In [11]: ls *.o  ls: *.o: No such file or directory  Ok, our directory is clean ! ### Add some state¶ Ok, that was kind of cute, fire-up a subprocess, serialize, pipe data in as a string, pipe-data out as a string, kill subprocess... What about something less state-less, or more stateful? Let's define the fibonacci function in python: In [12]: def fib(n): """ A simple definition of fibonacci manually unrolled """ if n<2: return 1 x,y = 1,1 for i in range(n-2): x,y = y,x+y return y  In [13]: [fib(i) for i in range(1,10)]  Out[13]: [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34] Store the value from 1 to 30 in Y, and graph it. In [14]: %matplotlib inline import numpy as np X = np.arange(1,30) Y = np.array([fib(x) for x in X]) import matplotlib.pyplot as plt fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.scatter(X, Y) ax.set_xlabel('n') ax.set_ylabel('fib(n)') ax.set_title('The Fibonacci sequence grows fast !')  Out[14]: <matplotlib.text.Text at 0x10caff470> It may not surprise you, but this looks like an exponential, so if we were to look at$log(fib(n))$×$n$it would look approximately like a line. We can try to do a linear regression using this model. R is a language many people use to do statistics. So, let's use R. Let's enable integration between Python and R using the RPy2 python package developed by Laurent Gautier and the rest of the rpy2 team. (Side note, you might need to change the environment variable passed to your kernel for this to work. Here is what I had to do only once.) In [15]: #!a2km add-env 'python 3' DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/anaconda/pkgs/icu-54.1-0/lib:/Users/bussonniermatthias/anaconda/pkgs/zlib-1.2.8-3/lib

In [16]:
import rpy2.rinterface



The Following will "Send" the X and Y array to R.

In [17]:
%Rpush Y X


And now let's try to fit a linear model ($ln(Y) = A.X + B$) using R. I'm not a R user myself, so don't take this as idiomatic R.

In [18]:
%%R
my_summary = summary(lm(log(Y)~X))
val <- my_summary$coefficients plot(X, log(Y)) abline(my_summary)  In [19]: %%R my_summary  Call: lm(formula = log(Y) ~ X) Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -0.183663 -0.013497 -0.004137 0.006046 0.296094 Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) -0.775851 0.026173 -29.64 <2e-16 *** X 0.479757 0.001524 314.84 <2e-16 *** --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 Residual standard error: 0.06866 on 27 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared: 0.9997, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9997 F-statistic: 9.912e+04 on 1 and 27 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16  Good, we have now the some statistics on the fit, which also looks good. And we were able to not only send variable to R, but to plot directly from R ! We are happy as$F_n = \left[\frac{\phi^n}{\sqrt 5}\right]$, where [] is closest integer and$\phi = \frac{1+\sqrt 5}{2}\$

We can also look at the variables more carefully

In [20]:
%%R
val

              Estimate  Std. Error   t value     Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -0.7758510 0.026172673 -29.64355 3.910319e-22
X            0.4797571 0.001523832 314.83597 1.137181e-49


Or even the following that looks more like python

In [21]:
%R val

Out[21]:
array([[ -7.75850975e-01,   2.61726725e-02,  -2.96435519e+01,
3.91031947e-22],
[  4.79757090e-01,   1.52383191e-03,   3.14835966e+02,
1.13718145e-49]])

We can even get the variable back from R as Python objects:

In [22]:
coefs = %Rget val
y0,k = coefs.T[0]
y0,k

Out[22]:
(-0.77585097534858738, 0.4797570904348315)

That's all from the R part. I hope this shows you some of the power of IPython, both in notebook and command line.

## CFFI¶

Great! We were able to send data back and forth! If does not works for all objects, but at least for the basic ones. It requires quite some work from the authors of the underlying library to allow you to do that. Though we are still limited to data. We can't (yet) send functions over which limits the utility.

### Mix and Match : C¶

One of the critical point of any code may at some point be performance. Python is known to not be the most performant language, though it is convenient and quick to write and has a large ecosystem. Most of the function you requires are probably available in a package, battle tested and optimized.

You might still need here and there the raw power of an ubiquitous language which is known for its speed when you know how to wield it well: C.

Though one of the disadvantage of C is the (relatively) slow iteration process due to the necessity of compilation/run part of the cycle. Let see if we can improve that by leveraging the excellent CFFI project, using my own small cffi_magic wrapper.

In [23]:
import cffi_magic

In [24]:
rm -rf *.o *.c *.so Cargo.* src target

In [25]:
ls *.c *.h *.o

ls: *.c: No such file or directory
ls: *.h: No such file or directory
ls: *.o: No such file or directory


Using the %%cffi magic we can define in the middle of our python code some C function:

In [26]:
%%cffi int cfib(int);

int cfib(int n)
{
int res=0;
if (n <= 1){
res = 1;
} else {
res = cfib(n-1)+cfib(n-2);
}
return res;
}


The first line take the "header" of the function we declare, and the rest of the cell takes the body of this function. The cfib function will automatically be made available to you in the main python namespace.

In [27]:
cfib(5)

Out[27]:
8

Oops there is a mistake as we should have fib(5) == 5. Luckily we can redefine the function on the fly. I could edit the above cell, but here as this will be rendered statically for the sake of demo purpose, I'm going to make a second cell:

In [28]:
%%cffi int cfib(int);

int cfib(int n)
{
int res=0;
if (n <= 2){  /*mistake was here*/
res = 1;
} else {
res = cfib(n-1)+cfib(n-2);
}
return res;
}

In [29]:
cfib(5)

Out[29]:
5

Great ! Let's compare the timing.

In [30]:
%timeit cfib(10)

The slowest run took 73.42 times longer than the fastest. This could mean that an intermediate result is being cached.
1000000 loops, best of 3: 379 ns per loop

In [31]:
%timeit fib(10)

The slowest run took 4.65 times longer than the fastest. This could mean that an intermediate result is being cached.
1000000 loops, best of 3: 853 ns per loop


Not so bad considering the C implementation is recursive, and the Python version is manually hand-rolled.

#### Implementation detail¶

So how do we do that magically under the hood? The knowledgeable reader is aware that CPython extensions cannot be reloaded. Though here we redefine the function... how come?

Using the user provided code we compile a shared object with a random name, import this as a module and alias using a user friendly name in the __main__ namespace. If the user re-execute we just get a new name, and change the alias mapping.

If one wan to optimize you can use a hash of the codecell string to not recompile if the user hasn't changed the code.

In [32]:
ls *.o *.c

_cffi_cWtAstIlGT.c  _cffi_cWtAstIlGT.o  _cffi_yxGAKIqXRR.c  _cffi_yxGAKIqXRR.o


With this in mind you can guess the same can be done for any language which can be compiled to a shared object, or a dynamically loadable library.

### Mix and Match : rust¶

The cffi module also allows you to do the same with Rust, a new language designed by Mozilla, which provide the same C-like level of control, while incorporating more recent understanding of programming and provide better memory safety. Let's see how we would do the same with Rust:

In [33]:
%%rust int rfib(int);

#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn rfib(n: i32) -> i32 {
match n {
0 => 1,
1 => 1,
2 => 1,
_ => rfib(n-1)+rfib(n-2)
}
}

injecting  rfib in user ns

In [34]:
[rfib(x) for x in range(1,10)]

Out[34]:
[1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34]

I'm not a Rustacean, but the above seem pretty straightforward to me. Again this might not be idiomatic Rust but you should be able to decipher what's above. The same than for C applies.

#### Still in development¶

Both the C and Rust example shown above use the cffi_magic on which I spent roughly 4 hours total, so the functionalities can be really crude and the documentation minimal at best. Feel free to send PRs if you are interested.

### Fortran¶

The fortran magic does the same as above, but has been developed by mgaitan and is slightly older. Again no surprise except you are supposed to mark fortran variable that are used to return the values.

In [35]:
%load_ext fortranmagic

/Users/bussonniermatthias/anaconda/lib/python3.5/site-packages/fortranmagic.py:147: UserWarning: get_ipython_cache_dir has moved to the IPython.paths module since IPython 4.0.
self._lib_dir = os.path.join(get_ipython_cache_dir(), 'fortran')

In [36]:
%%fortran
RECURSIVE SUBROUTINE ffib(n, fibo)
IMPLICIT NONE
INTEGER, INTENT(IN) :: n
INTEGER, INTENT(OUT) :: fibo
INTEGER :: tmp
IF (n <= 2) THEN
fibo = 1
ELSE
CALL ffib(n-1,fibo)
CALL ffib(n-2,tmp)
fibo = fibo + tmp
END IF
END SUBROUTINE ffib

In [37]:
[ffib(x) for x in range(1,10)]

Out[37]:
[1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34]

No surprise here, you are well aware of what we are doing.

### Cython¶

IPython used to ship with the Cython magic that is now part of Cython itself. Cython is a superset of Python that compiles to C and importable from Python. You should be a ble to take your python code as is, type annotate it, and get c-like speed. The same principle applies:

In [38]:
import cython

In [39]:
%load_ext cython

In [40]:
%%cython

def cyfib(int n): # note the int here
"""
A simple definition of fibonacci manually unrolled
"""
cdef int x,y # and the cdef int x,y here
if n < 2:
return 1
x,y = 1,1
for i in range(n-2):
x,y = y,x+y
return y

In [41]:
[cyfib(x) for x in range(1,10)]

Out[41]:
[1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34]

#### benchmark¶

In [42]:
%timeit -n100 -r3 fib(5)

100 loops, best of 3: 648 ns per loop

In [43]:
%timeit -n100 -r3 cfib(5)

The slowest run took 11.60 times longer than the fastest. This could mean that an intermediate result is being cached.
100 loops, best of 3: 578 ns per loop

In [44]:
%timeit -n100 -r3 ffib(5)

100 loops, best of 3: 147 ns per loop

In [45]:
%timeit -n100 -r3 cyfib(5)

100 loops, best of 3: 45.6 ns per loop


The benchmark result can be astonishing, but keep in mind that the Python and Cython version use manually unrolled loop. Main point being that we reached our goal and used Fortran, Cython, C (and Rust) in the middle of our Python program.

[let's skip the Rust fib version, it tends to segfault, and it would be sad to segfault now :-) ]

In [46]:
# %timeit rfib(10)


#### The Cake is not a lie!¶

So can we do a layer cake? Can we call rust from Python from Fortran from Cython? Or Cython from C from Fortran? Or Fortron from Cytran from Cust?

In [47]:
import itertools
lookup = {'c':cfib,
# 'rust': rfib, # as before Rust may segfault, but I dont' know why ...
'python': fib,
'fortran': ffib,
'cython': cyfib
}

print("Pray the demo-gods it wont segfault even without rust...")

Pray the demo-gods it wont segfault even without rust...

In [48]:
for function in lookup.values():
assert function(5) == 5, "Make sure all is correct or will use 100% CPU for a looong time."

In [49]:
for order in itertools.permutations(lookup):
t = 5
for f in order:
t = lookup[f](t)

print(' -> '.join(order), ':', t)

fortran -> cython -> python -> c : 5
fortran -> cython -> c -> python : 5
fortran -> python -> cython -> c : 5
fortran -> python -> c -> cython : 5
fortran -> c -> cython -> python : 5
fortran -> c -> python -> cython : 5
cython -> fortran -> python -> c : 5
cython -> fortran -> c -> python : 5
cython -> python -> fortran -> c : 5
cython -> python -> c -> fortran : 5
cython -> c -> fortran -> python : 5
cython -> c -> python -> fortran : 5
python -> fortran -> cython -> c : 5
python -> fortran -> c -> cython : 5
python -> cython -> fortran -> c : 5
python -> cython -> c -> fortran : 5
python -> c -> fortran -> cython : 5
python -> c -> cython -> fortran : 5
c -> fortran -> cython -> python : 5
c -> fortran -> python -> cython : 5
c -> cython -> fortran -> python : 5
c -> cython -> python -> fortran : 5
c -> python -> fortran -> cython : 5
c -> python -> cython -> fortran : 5

In [50]:
print('It worked ! I can run all the permutations !')

It worked ! I can run all the permutations !


## The Cherry on the Layer Cake, with Julia¶

If you have a small idea about how the above layer-cake is working you'll understand that there is (still) a non-negligible overhead as between each language switch we need to go back to Python-land. And the scope in which we can access function is still quite limited. The following is some really Dark Magic concocted by Fernando Perez and Steven Johnson using the Julia programming language. I can't even pretend to understand how this possible, but it's really impressive to see.

Let's try to handwave what's happening. I would be happy to get corrections.

The crux is that the Python and Julia interpreters can be started in a way where they each have access to the other process memory. Thus the Julia and Python interpreter can share live objects. You then "just" need to teach the Julia language about the structure of Python objects and it can manipulate these as desired, either directly (if the memory layout allow it) or using proxy objects that "delegate" the functionality to the python process.

The result being that Julia can import and use Python modules (using the Julia PyCall package), and Julia functions are available from within Python using the pyjulia module.

Let's see how this look like.

In [51]:
%matplotlib inline

In [52]:
%load_ext julia.magic

Initializing Julia interpreter. This may take some time...

In [53]:
julia_version = %julia VERSION
julia_version # you can see this is a wrapper

Out[53]:
<PyCall.jlwrap 0.5.0>

He we tell the julia process to import the python matplotlib module, as well as numpy.

In [54]:
%julia @pyimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt

In [55]:
%julia @pyimport numpy as np

In [56]:
%%julia
# Note how we mix numpy and julia:
t = linspace(0, 2*pi,1000);             # use the julia linspace and pi
s = sin(3*t + 4*np.cos(2*t));           # use the numpy cosine and julia sine
fig = plt.gcf()                         # **** WATCH THIS VARIABLE ****
plt.plot(t, s, color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--", label="sin(3t+4.cos(2t))")

Out[56]:
[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x327caeb70>]

All the above block of code is Julia, where, linspace,pi,sin are builtins of Julia. np.* and plt.* are referencing Python function and methods.

We see that t is a Julia "Array" (technically a 1000-element LinSpace{Float64}), which can get sent to numpy.cos, multiply by a Julia int, (..etc) and end up being plotted via matplotlib (Python), and displayed inline.

Let's finish our graph in Python

In [57]:
import numpy as np
fig = %julia fig
fig.axes[0].plot(X[:6], np.log(Y[:6]), '--', label='fib')
fig.axes[0].set_title('A weird Julia function and Fib')
fig.axes[0].legend()

fig

Out[57]:

Above we get the reference to our previously defined figure (in Julia), plot the log of our fib function. The key value here is that we get the same object from within Python and Julia. But let's push even further.

Above we had explicit transition between the Julia code and the Python code. Can we be more sneaky?

One toy example is to define the Fibonacci function using the recursive form and explicitly pass the function with which we recurse.

We'll define such a function both on the Julia and Python side, ask the Julia function to recurse by calling the Python one, and the Python one to recurse using the Julia one.

Let's print (P when we enter Python Kingdom, (J when we enter Julia Realm, and close the parenthesis accordingly:

In [58]:
from __future__ import print_function

# julia fib function
jlfib = %julia _fib(n, pyfib) = n <= 2 ? 1 : pyfib(n-1, _fib) + pyfib(n-2, _fib)

def pyfib(n, _fib):
"""
Python fib function
"""
print('(P', end='')
if n <= 2:
r = 1
else:
print('(J', end='')
# here we tell julia (_fib) to recurse using Python
r =  _fib(n-1, pyfib) + _fib(n-2, pyfib)
print(')',end='')
print(')',end='')
return r

In [59]:
fibonacci = lambda x: pyfib(x, jlfib)

fibonacci(10)

(P(J(P(J(P(J(P(J(P)(P)))(P(J))(P(J))(P)))(P(J(P(J))(P)(P)(P)))(P(J(P(J))(P)(P)(P)))(P(J(P)(P)))))(P(J(P(J(P(J))(P)(P)(P)))(P(J(P)(P)))(P(J(P)(P)))(P(J))))(P(J(P(J(P(J))(P)(P)(P)))(P(J(P)(P)))(P(J(P)(P)))(P(J))))(P(J(P(J(P)(P)))(P(J))(P(J))(P)))))
Out[59]:
55

## Cross language is Easy¶

I hope you enjoyed that, I find it quite interesting and useful when you need to leverage the tools available across multiple domains. I'm sure there are plenty of other tools that allow this kind of things and a host of other languages that can interact with each other in this way.

From the top of my head I know of a few magics (SQL, Redis...) that provide such integration. Every language has its strong and weak points, and knowing what to use is often hard. I hope I convinced you that mixing languages is not such a daunting task.

The other case when this is useful is when you are learning a new language, you can leverage your current expertise temporarily and get something that work before learning the idiomatic way and available libraries.

from IPython.display import Image

Pfiew