I built a Python ORM with a Rust engine — here's how the GIL, PyO3, and asyncio actually cooperate

I like Tortoise ORM. Django-style models, async-first, clean. But I wanted more speed on read-heavy...

martedì 30 giugno 2026 New tab

1,230 words~6 min read

I like Tortoise ORM. Django-style models, async-first, clean. But I wanted more speed on read-heavy paths without reaching for SQLAlchemy, so I built yara-orm: a Tortoise-style async ORM where the model and query layer is Python, but the engine — connection pooling, parameter binding, and row decoding — is written in Rust (PyO3 over tokio-postgres and rusqlite).

The API is exactly what you'd expect:

from yara_orm import Model, YaraOrm, fields, in_transaction

class Author(Model):

id = fields.IntField(pk=True)

I built a Python ORM with a Rust engine — here's how the GIL, PyO3, and asyncio actually cooperate

I built a Python ORM with a Rust engine — here's how the GIL, PyO3, and asyncio actually cooperate

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