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As a Ruby and Python developer I often wonder why Ruby doesn't need a virtual env. What did Ruby get right that Python didn't?
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Everyone ends up using rbenv or rvm.
You don't need them to solve this problem, though. The basic facilities are baked into rubygems.
But it's not as quick and clean as "python -m venv venv", so everyone uses that (and pyenv for different versions).
As a Ruby and Python developer I often wonder why Ruby doesn't need a virtual env. What did Ruby get right that Python didn't?
well, a lot of "system" utilities are implemented in Python and I'm not aware of many in Ruby (they must exist? I just checked to see what on my system depends on Ruby and it seems like the only things are a screenruler utility, some texlive packages I've never heard of and gnome-code-assistance, whatever that is). Pip installing random crap is a great way to completely break some Linux systems.
Could someone ELI7 why python is struggling so hard with dependencies and dependency management when in the Java world this is a solved problem and just works with maven, which is working so damn well it last got updated in November 2019, and the biggest fight going is whether you should use gradle as client instead of maven to access the same dependency ecosystem? I had to set up Python projects for some machine lea…
I am probably in the minority, but my experience is the complete opposite. I had more trouble trying to set up a gradle project in university than I ever had with Python.
Could someone ELI7 why python is struggling so hard with dependencies and dependency management when in the Java world this is a solved problem and just works with maven, which is working so damn well it last got updated in November 2019, and the biggest fight going is whether you should use gradle as client instead of maven to access the same dependency ecosystem? I had to set up Python projects for some machine lea…
I am probably in the minority, but my experience is the complete opposite. I had more trouble trying to set up a gradle project in university than I ever had with Python.
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Not sure about ruby, but most of the languages I know about, C#, javascript, php, etc don't need virtualenv because they install packages in a project locally (and globally if required). so envs of one project do not clash with another. while python install packages globally and only globally . so a virtualenv is needed to isolate different projects from one another
Last time I used python I just did pip install -r requirements.txt -t libs and added the folder to PYTHONPATH. I never bothered with virtualenv.
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> It is not hard to run into missing .h files while trying to install these dependencies. They would be if python provided the .h files in the packages rather than expecting them to already exist on the system.
That's just dangerous band-aid. If there is a mismatch between bundled .h and installed system library, you'll get (in better case) linker error, or runtime problems.
Could someone ELI7 why python is struggling so hard with dependencies and dependency management when in the Java world this is a solved problem and just works with maven, which is working so damn well it last got updated in November 2019, and the biggest fight going is whether you should use gradle as client instead of maven to access the same dependency ecosystem? I had to set up Python projects for some machine lea…
One reason people like PEP 582 is that, by being something built into the interpreter, it will reduce a lot of the confusion over which isolation tool to use.
Part of the problem, which local installs won't completely solve, is that the python interpreter is still changing fast enough that modules are having trouble keeping up. E.g. tensorflow is still working on python3.9 support [1], and now we'll see python3.10 in the next couple weeks. Even with local installs we'll have to be careful to use the right interpreter.
Another piece of the problem, which is also kind of a good thing, is the huge size of the python module ecosystem. I've got python scripts with over a hundred requirements. It saves me from writing a lot of code, but resolving the requirements is a challenge. The pip package manager has recently added a dependency resolver, which has helped a little make sure everything can work together.
The only surefire ways I can think of to make this huge module ecosystem interoperate cleanly are (1) have every module support every other version of every other module and interpreter (insane amount of work, won't happen) or (2) have simpler interop interfaces like the unix shell convention of only passing strings between programs, but that would take away a lot of the ease-of-use of passing rich objects around between modules.
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Not sure about ruby, but most of the languages I know about, C#, javascript, php, etc don't need virtualenv because they install packages in a project locally (and globally if required). so envs of one project do not clash with another. while python install packages globally and only globally . so a virtualenv is needed to isolate different projects from one another
What do you mean "python install[s] globally and only globally"? That's not true. You can instruct pip to install to any place you want.
this is why you need to activate virtualenv every time you open a new command line, so that it can set ENV variables for the current session and force python to use the locally scoped folders.
While in C# et all. the compiler knows to check files locally. and you don't need to activate (or deactivate) environment at all.
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JavaScript's package management is significantly better than Pythons: - There's one tool to use, and it comes pre-installed - You don't have to deal with virtualenvs or packages from different projects conflicting. - Native code dependencies "just work".
> You don't have to deal with virtualenvs or packages from different projects conflicting. That's only because you're basically assured there will be conflicts inside any single project . Every time I install anything via npm I get a boatload of warnings about insecure dependencies, which are effectively impossible to fix without breaking the whole mountain of hacks. There are good deployment stories out there. JS is…
That's not an issue with the package management though, that's an issue with the quality of the packages themselves. The JS ecosystem does have issues there. But the tooling itself is good.