Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
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Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
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Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#2I've been doing software of all kinds for a long long time.
I've never, ever, been in a position where I was concerned about the speed of my package manager.
Compiler, yes. Linker, sure. Package downloader. No.
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#3Really interesting post, but this part from the beginning stuck out to me:
Ruby Gems are tar files, and one of the files in the tar file is a YAML representation of the GemSpec. This YAML file declares all dependencies for the Gem, so RubyGems can know, without evaling anything, what dependencies it needs to install before it can install any particular Gem. Additionally, RubyGems.org provides an API for asking about dependency information, which is actually the normal way of getting dependency info (again, no eval required).
That said, the points at the end about not needing to parse gemspecs to install "most" dependencies would make this pretty moot (if the information is already returned from the gemserver)
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#4I've been doing software of all kinds for a long long time. I've never, ever, been in a position where I was concerned about the speed of my package manager. Compiler, yes. Linker, sure. Package downloader. No.
Many of these package managers get invoked countless times per day (e.g., in CI to prepare an environment and run tests, while spinning up new dev/AI agent environments, etc).
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#5Recent and related:
How uv got so fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393992 - Dec 2025 (457 comments)
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#6I've been doing software of all kinds for a long long time. I've never, ever, been in a position where I was concerned about the speed of my package manager. Compiler, yes. Linker, sure. Package downloader. No.
Many of these package managers get invoked countless times per day (e.g., in CI to prepare an environment and run tests, while spinning up new dev/AI agent environments, etc).
Ye,s but if your CI isn't terrible, you have the dependencies cached, so that subsequent runs are almost instant, and more importantly, you don't have a hard dependency on a third party service.
The reason for speeding up bundler isn't CI, it's newcomer experience. `bundle install` is the overwhelming majority of the duration of `rails new`.
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#7I've been doing software of all kinds for a long long time. I've never, ever, been in a position where I was concerned about the speed of my package manager. Compiler, yes. Linker, sure. Package downloader. No.
When you're in a big company, the problem really starts showing. A service can have 100+ dependencies, many in private repos, and once you start adding and modifying dependencies, it has to figure out how to version it to create the lock file across all of these and it can be really slow.
Cloud dev environments can also take several minutes to set up.
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#8I appreciate that Aaron is focusing on the practical algorithm/design improvements that could be made to Bundler, vs. prematurely going all in on "rewrite in Rust".
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of these package managers get invoked countless times per day (e.g., in CI to prepare an environment and run tests, while spinning up new dev/AI agent environments, etc).
Ye,s but if your CI isn't terrible, you have the dependencies cached, so that subsequent runs are almost instant, and more importantly, you don't have a hard dependency on a third party service. The reason for speeding up bundler isn't CI, it's newcomer experience. `bundle install` is the overwhelming majority of the duration of `rails new`.
> Ye,s but if your CI isn't terrible, you have the dependencies cached, so that subsequent runs are almost instant, and more importantly, you don't have a hard dependency on a third party service.
I’d wager the majority of CI usage fits your bill of “terrible”. No provider provides OOTB caching in my experience, and I’ve worked with multiple in house providers, Jenkins, teamcity, GHA, buildkite.
Re: Can Bundler be as fast as uv?
#10I've been doing software of all kinds for a long long time. I've never, ever, been in a position where I was concerned about the speed of my package manager. Compiler, yes. Linker, sure. Package downloader. No.
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