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How uv got so fast

nesbitt.io

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Re: How uv got so fast

#51

Post by toenail »

andy99 wrote: post #42

I remain baffled about these posts getting excited about uv’s speed. I’d like to see a real poll but I personally can’t imagine people listing speed as one of the their top ten concerns about python package managers. What are the common use cases where the delay due to package installation is at all material? Edit to add: I use python daily

The speed is nice, but I switched because uv supports "pip compile" from pip-tools, and it is better at resolving dependencies. Also pip-tools uses (used?) internal pip methods and breaks frequently because of that, uv doesn't.

Re: How uv got so fast

#52

Post by recov »

andy99 wrote: post #42

I remain baffled about these posts getting excited about uv’s speed. I’d like to see a real poll but I personally can’t imagine people listing speed as one of the their top ten concerns about python package managers. What are the common use cases where the delay due to package installation is at all material? Edit to add: I use python daily

Docker builds are a big one, at least at my company. Any tool that reduces wait time is worth using, and uv is an amazing tool that removes that wait time. I take it you might not use python much as it solves almost every pain point, and is fast which feels rare.

Re: How uv got so fast

#53

Post by stavros »

andy99 wrote: post #42

I remain baffled about these posts getting excited about uv’s speed. I’d like to see a real poll but I personally can’t imagine people listing speed as one of the their top ten concerns about python package managers. What are the common use cases where the delay due to package installation is at all material? Edit to add: I use python daily

I can run `uvx sometool` without fear because I know that it'll take a few seconds to create a venv, download all the dependencies, and run the tool. uv's speed has literally changed how I work with Python.

Re: How uv got so fast

#54

Post by fleebee »

yunohn wrote: post #43
pecheny wrote: post #25

The content is nice and insightful! But God I wish people stopped using LLMs to 'improve' their prose... Ironically, some day we might employ LLMs to re-humanize texts that had been already massacred.

I have reached a point where any AI smell (of which this articles has many) makes me want to exit immediately. It feels tortuous to my reading sensibilities. I blame fixed AI system prompts - they forcibly collapse all inputs into the same output space. Truly disappointing that OpenAI et all have no desire to change this before everything on the internet sounds the same forever.

You're probably right about the latter point, but I do wonder how hard it'd be to mask the default "marketing copywriter" tone of the LLM by asking it to assume some other tone in your prompt.

As you said, reading this stuff is taxing. What's more, this is a daily occurrence by now. If there's a silver lining, it's that the LLM smells are so obvious at the moment; I can close the tab as soon as I notice one.

Re: How uv got so fast

#55

Post by rsyring »

andy99 wrote: post #42

I remain baffled about these posts getting excited about uv’s speed. I’d like to see a real poll but I personally can’t imagine people listing speed as one of the their top ten concerns about python package managers. What are the common use cases where the delay due to package installation is at all material? Edit to add: I use python daily

As a multi decade Python user, uv's speed is "life changing". It's a huge devx improvement. We lived with what came before, but now that I have it, I would never want to go back and it's really annoying to work on projects now that aren't using it.

Re: How uv got so fast

#56

Post by thraxil »

andy99 wrote: post #42

I remain baffled about these posts getting excited about uv’s speed. I’d like to see a real poll but I personally can’t imagine people listing speed as one of the their top ten concerns about python package managers. What are the common use cases where the delay due to package installation is at all material? Edit to add: I use python daily

Working heavily in Python for the last 20 years, it absolutely was a big deal. `pip install` has been a significant percentage of the deploy time on pretty much every app I've ever deployed and I've spent countless hours setting up various caching techniques trying to speed it up.

Re: How uv got so fast

#57

Post by [deleted] »

pecheny wrote: post #25

The content is nice and insightful! But God I wish people stopped using LLMs to 'improve' their prose... Ironically, some day we might employ LLMs to re-humanize texts that had been already massacred.

[deleted]

Re: How uv got so fast

#58

Post by SatvikBeri »

andy99 wrote: post #42

I remain baffled about these posts getting excited about uv’s speed. I’d like to see a real poll but I personally can’t imagine people listing speed as one of the their top ten concerns about python package managers. What are the common use cases where the delay due to package installation is at all material? Edit to add: I use python daily

Setting up a new dev instance took 2+ hours with pip at my work. Switching to uv dropped the Python portion down to A similar, but less drastic speedup applied to docker images.

Re: How uv got so fast

#59

Post by zahlman »

I've talked about this many times on HN this year but got beaten to the punch on blogging it seems. Curses.

... Okay, after a brief look, there's still lots of room for me to comment. In particular:

> pip’s slowness isn’t a failure of implementation. For years, Python packaging required executing code to find out what a package needed.

This is largely refuted by the fact that pip is still slow, even when installing from wheels (and getting PEP 600 metadata for them). Pip is actually still slow even when doing nothing. (And when you create a venv and allow pip to be bootstrapped in it, that bootstrap process takes in the high 90s percent of the total time used.)

Re: How uv got so fast

#60

Post by glaslong »

woodruffw wrote: post #5

I think this post does a really good job of covering how multi-pronged performance is: it certainly doesn't hurt uv to be written in Rust, but it benefits immensely from a decade of thoughtful standardization efforts in Python that lifted the ecosystem away from needing `setup.py` on the hot path for most packages.

Someone once told me a benefit of staffing a project for Haskell was it made it easy to select for the types of programmers that went out of their way to become experts in Haskell.

Tapping the Rust community is a decent reason to do a project in Rust.

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