Those progress bars with time of other linters - is it a joke or it's a data from stupidly enourmous codebase? Or slow (>1s) linters is something that is normal in python?
Astral
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Re: Astral
#12A faster version of black is not a strong enough value proposition for an entire company. Ruff should remain an open source product. What is the point of making every half decent Developer tool a whole startup?
I agree, but I also don't make the decision. The free market decides whether their value proposition is enough, so the company's success is dependent on the developer demand.
Re: Astral
#13What is it beyond a linter.
Also: speed is good, but when it comes to linting, that's not what I'd place first as a feature.
How good is the code at spotting my potential mistakes would come before speed for sure.
Hence: it's fast, but is it in any way better than the other solutions out there?
Re: Astral
#14It's true that being that much faster is interesting, but that's not the only reason.
ruff is just really good.
It has sane defaults, it is easy to use and configure. It can replace not one but multiple tools.
From day one it had few bugs or integration problems.
Charlie Marsh is just a damn good developer, on top of driving a good product vision.
That's rare.
Lots of respect to that.
Re: Astral
#15Those progress bars with time of other linters - is it a joke or it's a data from stupidly enourmous codebase? Or slow (>1s) linters is something that is normal in python?
It's linting the entire CPython codebase and standard library, which is quite large (possibly one of the largest python codebases). But yes, pure python linters will be inherently quite a bit slower than a native implementation. The point of ruff is that it's so fast you forget or never even notice it's running. Every change, every little modification, etc. should always be linted with near instant feedback.
Re: Astral
#16A faster version of black is not a strong enough value proposition for an entire company. Ruff should remain an open source product. What is the point of making every half decent Developer tool a whole startup?
That's just a foot in the door. Like sentry made a good logging library, then pivoted to an observability service. And today I use sentry because I have a great history with their product. It's smart and a positive way to make money. I dig it. PS: ruff is not replacing black (although it will probably in the end), but compete with flake8 and pylint.
Sentry had a natural path into cloud services because error monitoring has a server-side component to it.
Serious question, what is the path for a linter? Where else are people paying for linting as a service?
Re: Astral
#17A faster version of black is not a strong enough value proposition for an entire company. Ruff should remain an open source product. What is the point of making every half decent Developer tool a whole startup?
I agree with you. On the other hand, if you build something cool you may want to make some money...
The problem imo, is changing the speech in the middle of the way, aham openai
Re: Astral
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is the point of making every half decent Developer tool a whole startup? I mean, paying people who work on it, for one?
I’m not against folks getting paid. My question is how does one build an entire company selling a slightly better version of a widely used open source tool? Ruff is not strong enough to build a company from.
Python has become a hugely critical language for science, AI/ML, finance, etc. and the current state of tooling has lagged the language's importance. I can think of lots of ways a company that solves that problem could add adjacent products and monetize them. Enterprise support, tooling for building and deploying custom lint rules, supply-chain security, managed builds, etc.
Re: Astral
#19A faster version of black is not a strong enough value proposition for an entire company. Ruff should remain an open source product. What is the point of making every half decent Developer tool a whole startup?
this is too narrowly focused on what Ruff does today and not enough on what it could do for the Python ecosystem as a whole. his focus and clear execution has built an incredible wedge and brand, and his next product will probably be well received, and the next, and the next.
the opportunity to bring speed and sanity to the whole Python Ecosystem tooling is large (if you dont feel the pain, you don't do enough python) and honestly i cant belive anyone has been (crazy enough) to try this since Anaconda.
Re: Astral
#20Having written a bunch of Flake8 plugins, including custom plugins for internal use at a company, and using 5-10 popular plugins on every Python project I work on... rewriting the entire linting ecosystem in one monolithic Rust tool doesn't feel like the best solution. There's no good story for building an ecosystem around this yet, and I think that's a big hurdle to overcome. Ruff is fast, sure, but the benchmarking…
There's no reason your custom bespoke plugins couldn't be called by ruff as necessary. It's silly to burden the happy path of 99% of users who just need common sense python linting with those edge cases and custom needs.
That could be done in one of two ways:
- Supporting flake8 plugins, using the existing community, and sacrificing the speed.
- Requiring new plugins, in Python or another scripting language, sacrificing the community progress and goodwill, and sacrificing some of the speed.
Neither of these options is good. The Python linting ecosystem is a mature one with a lot of investment into the existing tools, and rather than try to speed those up (which could be done in a number of ways), Ruff started from scratch.
It doesn't feel like the right decision for an ecosystem that is as community focused as Python, and the engineering reasons feel like a toss up at best.