cudf

Safe Rust bindings for NVIDIA's libcudf -- GPU-accelerated DataFrame operations.

Features

• Near-zero unsafe public API -- all unsafe is confined to the internal FFI layer, with the sole exception of DLPackTensor::from_raw_ptr
• Zero-cost ownership -- Column and Table map directly to libcudf's RAII types
• Compile-time safety -- Rust's borrow checker prevents use-after-free on GPU memory
• Arrow interop -- zero-copy conversion to/from arrow-rs arrays
• Full libcudf coverage -- all operations including groupby, join, sort, I/O, strings

Quick Start

use cudf::{Column, Table, Result};

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    // Create GPU columns from host data
    let ids = Column::from_slice(&[1i32, 2, 3, 4, 5])?;
    let values = Column::from_slice(&[10.0f64, 20.0, 30.0, 40.0, 50.0])?;

    // Build a table
    let table = Table::new(vec![ids, values])?;
    assert_eq!(table.num_columns(), 2);
    assert_eq!(table.num_rows(), 5);

    // Read back
    let col = table.column(0)?;
    let data: Vec<i32> = col.to_vec()?;
    assert_eq!(data, vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5]);

    Ok(())
}

Prerequisites

• NVIDIA GPU (Volta or newer, compute capability 7.0+)
• CUDA 12.2+
• libcudf installed (see cudf-sys for installation instructions)
• Linux (libcudf does not support macOS or Windows)

Crate Structure

cudf-rs/
├── cudf-sys   -- links libcudf.so (build script only)
├── cudf-cxx   -- cxx-based FFI bridge + C++ shim layer
└── cudf       -- this crate: safe, idiomatic Rust API

Public API Surface

Core Types

Re-exports

pub use Column, CudfType, Table, TableWithMetadata, Scalar;
pub use DataType, TypeId, NullHandling;
pub use CudfError, Result;
pub use SortOrder, NullOrder;
pub use OutOfBoundsPolicy;
pub use UnaryOp, BinaryOp;
pub use DuplicateKeepOption;
pub use AggregationKind, GroupBy, GroupByGroups, GroupByReplacePolicy, GroupByScan, GroupByScanOp;
pub use ReduceOp, ScanOp, MinMaxResult;
pub use Interpolation;
pub use RollingAgg;
pub use JoinResult, HashJoin, SemiJoinResult;
pub use JsonObjectOptions;
pub use PartitionResult;
pub use NullReplacePolicy;
pub use DLPackTensor, PackedTable, SplitResult;

Compute Operations

Data Manipulation

I/O

String Operations

All string operations are methods on Column (for string-typed columns):

Arrow Interop

Feature Flags