DRF Accelerator

Caution

Experimental / Under Development This project is currently an experiment to improve DRF performance using Rust. It is NOT production-ready and has strict scope limitations.

A high-performance Rust-backed accelerator for Django Rest Framework.

Performance Benchmark (1,000 items)

Method	Primitives (1k)	Complex (1k)	Speedup
Standard DRF	4.63ms	38.4ms	1x
drf-accelerator	0.26ms	3.2ms	~12x to ~17x

Benchmark run on 1,000 objects with 6 fields (including DateTime, UUID, and Decimal) using pytest-benchmark.

Installation & Setup

For Users (Stable)

Install directly from PyPI:

pip install drf-accelerator

Note

Since this is a Rust extension, you will need a modern Python environment. Pre-built wheels are provided for common platforms.

From Source

If you want to install the latest development version:

1. Prerequisites: Ensure you have Rust installed.
2. Clone & Install:

   git clone https://github.com/p-r-a-v-i-n/drf-accelerator.git
   cd drf-accelerator
   pip install -e .

For Developers (Try it out)

If you want to run the benchmarks yourself:

1. Build the extension:

   cd drf_accelerator
   maturin develop --release
   cd ..

2. Run Benchmarks:

   cd drf_accelerator
   pytest benchmarks/ -v --benchmark-only

Usage

Simply inherit from FastSerializationMixin in your ModelSerializer:

from drf_accelerator import FastSerializationMixin
from rest_framework import serializers

class MySerializer(FastSerializationMixin, serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        fields = ["id", "title", "author", "is_published"]

Limitations (Strict)

To maintain high performance and safety, the following are not supported:

• Dotted Sources: source="user.profile.age" will error.
• Nested Serializers: Cannot be used inside an accelerated serializer.
• Method Fields: SerializerMethodField is not supported.
• Complex Types: Only int, str, float, bool, None, datetime, date, time, uuid, and decimal are supported.

How it works

The Mixin swaps the standard DRF ListSerializer for a FastListSerializer that offloads the object-to-dict conversion loop to a Rust extension using PyO3. This significantly reduces Python interpreter overhead for large list responses.