drf-oxide

Drop-in, Rust-accelerated serializers, JSON renderer and JSON parser for Django REST framework. The Rust part lives in drf-oxide-core, the same way pydantic sits on pydantic-core.

pip install drf-oxide

Supports Python 3.10–3.14, Django 4.2–5.2 and Django REST framework 3.14–3.16.

Usage

from drf_oxide import serializers          # instead of: from rest_framework import serializers


class BookSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = '__all__'

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': ['drf_oxide.renderers.JSONRenderer'],
    'DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES': ['drf_oxide.parsers.JSONParser'],
}

Or, without touching imports, put drf_oxide first in INSTALLED_APPS: it swaps DRF's Serializer, ModelSerializer, HyperlinkedModelSerializer, ListSerializer, JSONRenderer and JSONParser for the fast ones before any other app imports its serializers.

INSTALLED_APPS = ['drf_oxide', *INSTALLED_APPS]

drf_oxide.patch() does the same from code; it has to run before the serializers are defined.

How it works

Each serializer instance is compiled once: every field gets a native kind when its class uses the stock DRF implementation, otherwise the core calls the field's own Python methods. Native code only handles the plain, valid case; anything unusual (an error, an odd input type, a value that needs rounding) is handed back to DRF, so output and error messages stay identical.

Django relations that are already loaded (select_related, prefetch_related) are read straight from the instance caches, skipping the relation descriptors and the related managers; anything not cached goes through the descriptor as usual.

ModelSerializer works out its model fields (model introspection, field classes and kwargs) once per serializer class, language and settings, instead of on every instance as DRF does, as long as the class keeps DRF's stock field-building methods. Every instance still gets its own field objects.

• drf_oxide.disabled() runs plain DRF inside the block.
• drf_oxide = False on a serializer class opts it out.

Speed

make bench (1000 rows, 15 fields incl. a nested serializer, Python 3.13, release build):

Per field kind, serialization is ~10x for strings, ints, bools, decimals and choices; datetimes in a non-UTC active timezone and UUIDs gain less (~4x / ~2.5x).

Development

The two packages live in sibling checkouts of Kanzey/drf-oxide and Kanzey/drf-oxide-core; uv sync installs the core from ../drf-oxide-core.

cd ../drf-oxide-core && make develop   # or `make release` for benchmarks
cd ../drf-oxide && uv sync && make test
make bench