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Astral

astral.sh

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Re: Astral

#21

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

kitanata wrote: post #8
paulgb wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.

> X is not strong enough to build a company from.

I mean, these are the famous last words of a lot of non-visionaries. I'm not saying that Ruff is some kind of unicorn, but there are a lot of cases where a seemingly small improvement on an existing technology resulted in a very successful enterprise. Docker, for example. There are others that I'm sure people will chime in with.

Re: Astral

#22

Post by qudat »

kitanata wrote: post #4

A 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'm inclined to agree and when they eventually die, what happens to the tool they built?

I've been using https://rome.tools and really love the work they put into it. It's clear they had people working fulltime on it. But now, what? The code is open-source, there are people working on it, but development has mostly dropped off. I guess that's okay? It just adds a lot of doubt into the longevity of the project.

I'd be wary adding these tools into your stack because their progress relies pretty heavily on VC funding and a tight runway to profitability.

Re: Astral

#23

Post by overthrow »

divan wrote: post #11

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?

I worked on a 50k-100k loc python codebase where the linters took a full minute to run if you deleted your cache. And I did try to optimize it. I wouldn't be surprised if that's normal.

Re: Astral

#24

Post by rtuin »

Perfect timing, I’m excited to what Astral will bring.

The python ecosystem keeps building momentum as “doing things with data” becomes bigger, more accessible, and also more (near) real-time and I think the ecosystem would really thrive with better, unambiguous tools that become de facto to the community of builders instead of plenty of suboptimal ones to choose from.

Re: Astral

#25

Post by BiteCode_dev »

overthrow wrote: post #16
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know their plan, so I can't speak for them.

What I would do is build an entire ecosystem of that quality that would include a tool to solve the Python distributions problem.

Either you help with deployment on the server, and you offer hosting.

Or you help with making an installer, and you offer nodes to build installers for multiple OS and upload to multiple app stores, manage updates, cdn, permissions...

You can even start small and just help with a service for cross-compiling C extensions and scale from that.

Or provide machine learning analysis of the quality of your code and make companies pay for it.

Or go full Continuum.

They are good enough that they can pick and choose whatever they want, really.

When you solve pain, people pay. If readthedoc managed to survive by being a static rst site, astral has a shot provided they keep the business side of things in mind as nicely as they build their user stories.

Re: Astral

#26

Post by bin_bash »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #10
danpalmer wrote: post #6

Having 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's what esbuild did for their plugins—which made them useless since it kills any performance gains of switching to esbuild in the first place

Re: Astral

#27

Post by andy_xor_andrew »

In the last few weeks I've been using Python to play with some LLMs locally, and at first I thought there was some bug in VS Code because the linting was so slooooooow.

This seems long overdue! Looks like a great project :)

Re: Astral

#28

Post by swyx »

akprasad wrote: post #5

I love Ruff and I'm glad that Charlie and the rest of the team are able to work on such tools full-time. I'm also happy to see that the author of Maturin (Rust+Python interop) is involved, as Maturin is a fantastic project with great ease-of-use. For those who aren't familiar, Ruff is a very fast Python linter that supersedes a variety of tools like isort, flake8, and perhaps eventually Black [1]. My understanding is…

if it's any consolation, Accel is in my mind one of the "good ones". they have a record of backing "good" devtool companies that manage open source and commercial concerns well - Vercel, Sentry, etc. (i'm sure theres more, those are just the two that i'm closest to)

Re: Astral

#29

Post by qbasic_forever »

danpalmer wrote: post #20
qbasic_forever wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

???

There is no downside to adding your bespoke flake8 plugins. For people that don't use them (99% of people) they get the benefit of blazing speed. For your custom plugins you live with the tradeoff of slower execution to do those AST passes with flake8/python tools. Even if ruff didn't exist you would still be burdened with your slow flake8 plugins speed. There is zero downside to you and only upside to people that aren't you.

Kinda just sounds like you're grousing because somebody moved the cheese.

Re: Astral

#30

Post by swyx »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #14

It'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.

> Charlie Marsh is just a damn good developer

curious how you assessed this. did you inspect the code or are you just commenting from the user POV?

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