6. How to CRATE something else entirely

Take a look at crates.io - there's so much good stuff there! There's probably a package for practically any use case.

For example, this looks like a fun one: rust_stemmers. It lets us input a word, and stem it (i.e. reduce it to a simpler version, e.g. 'fearlessly' -> 'fearless'). Can we make a plugin out of it?

Cargo this, cargo that

If we're going to use rust_stemmers, we're going to need to take it on as a dependency. The easiest way to do this is probably to run cargo add rust_stemmers - run this, and watch how Cargo.toml changes! You should see the line

rust-stemmers = "1.2.0"

somewhere in there.

Writing a Snowball Stemmer

Let's write a function which:

• takes a Utf8 columns as input;
• produces a Utf8 column as output.

We'd like to be able to call it as follows:

df.with_columns(stemmed_word=mp.snowball_stem('word'))

On the Python side, let's add the following function to minimal_plugin/__init__.py:

def snowball_stem(expr: IntoExprColumn) -> pl.Expr:
    return register_plugin_function(
        args=[expr],
        plugin_path=LIB,
        function_name="snowball_stem",
        is_elementwise=True,
    )

Then, we can define the function like this in src/expressions.rs:

use rust_stemmers::{Algorithm, Stemmer};

#[polars_expr(output_type=String)]
fn snowball_stem(inputs: &[Series]) -> PolarsResult<Series> {
    let ca: &StringChunked = inputs[0].str()?;
    let en_stemmer = Stemmer::create(Algorithm::English);
    let out: StringChunked = ca.apply_into_string_amortized(|value: &str, output: &mut String| {
        write!(output, "{}", en_stemmer.stem(value)).unwrap()
    });
    Ok(out.into_series())
}

Let's try it out! Put the following in run.py:

import polars as pl
import minimal_plugin as mp

df = pl.DataFrame({'word': ["fearlessly", "littleness", "lovingly", "devoted"]})
print(df.with_columns(b=mp.snowball_stem('word')))

If you then compile with maturin develop (or maturin develop --release if you're benchmarking), and run it with python run.py, you'll see:

shape: (4, 2)
┌────────────┬──────────┐
│ a          ┆ b        │
│ ---        ┆ ---      │
│ str        ┆ str      │
╞════════════╪══════════╡
│ fearlessly ┆ fearless │
│ littleness ┆ littl    │
│ lovingly   ┆ love     │
│ devoted    ┆ devot    │
└────────────┴──────────┘

In this example, we took on an extra dependency, which increased the size of the package. By using plugins, we have a way of accessing extra functionality without having to bloat up the size of the main Polars install too much!

Stretch goal

Browse through crates.io - is there any other crate you could use to make your own plugin out of?