What is the reason for choosing Rust (altium-rs) over Python (PyAltium)?

[Argmaster]

Just asking, no taunt intended.

[tgross35]

Totally reasonable question!

I just kind of hit a point in the Python parsing where it was difficult to work with the binary data. I could extract the files alright and do the basics, but it was just a bit hard to get the nuances of binary data when e.g. your integers aren’t sized.

Error handling too, it’s very nice with Rust’s Result that you know exactly what kind of errors you might get and have to either handle or propagate them: easier to miss errors that get thrown in Python. Plus I have wrote .context that let me add a comment to a “actions backtrace” before propagating it, in one line (example]), which is quite helpful.

I plan to expose Python bindings to this library via PyO3 since I think that’s how a lot of people will use it, but rust is just a really good tool for parsing and for repetitive code.

Do you have any use case or are looking to help out? I am very curious how people are using this library

[Argmaster]

Unfortunately I don't have any use case (I have nothing to do with PCB design), for now I was just curious, and Your response was definitely convincing. When it comes to Altium format, I was unable to find any specification for it which is a bit discouraging. At the same time I have a lot of work around implementing Gerber format, so I may not have time to get my hands on another project. I'm thankful for Your response and I wish you good luck with the implementation!

[tgross35]

It is certainly not very well documented, but https://github.com/vadmium/python-altium/blob/9e3cf5a16150e74ba2b7e6d1f2895e0ce16b9a05/format.md has helped a lot. It is pretty out of date so things like pins are now stored differently, but it at least gives a good idea of what the field names are.

Happy to help!