How uv got so fast • Hacker News Board

Re: How uv got so fast

#181

Post by xvector » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 1:35 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #174

eru wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money). Money is indeed a great lubricator. However, it's not black-and-white: office politics is a long standing term for a reason.

Office politics happen when people determine they can get more money by engaging in politics instead of working. This is just an indicator people aren't being paid enough money (since people politicking around is detrimental to the company, it is better off paying them whatever it takes for them not to engage in such behavior). "You get what you pay for" applies yet again.

Hard disagree, most of my coworkers make well north of $1M and office politics is at an all time high.

I believe office politics happens when there are simply too many people at a company or org.

Re: How uv got so fast

#182

Post by DrawTR » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 1:43 AM UTC

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.

Editing the post to switch five "it's X not Y"s[1] is pretty disappointing. I wish people were more clear with their disclosure of LLM editing.

[1]: https://github.com/andrew/nesbitt.io/commit/0664881a524feac4...

Re: How uv got so fast

#183

Post by dpark » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 1:50 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #174

eru wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money). Money is indeed a great lubricator. However, it's not black-and-white: office politics is a long standing term for a reason.

Office politics happen when people determine they can get more money by engaging in politics instead of working. This is just an indicator people aren't being paid enough money (since people politicking around is detrimental to the company, it is better off paying them whatever it takes for them not to engage in such behavior). "You get what you pay for" applies yet again.

Politicking is just group dynamics. In large companies people engage in politics because it becomes necessary to accomplish large things.

Of course a group can also have bad actors but that’s not really an issue with politics specifically. Politics are neither good nor bad.

Re: How uv got so fast

#184

Post by eduction » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 1:50 AM UTC

pxc wrote: post #167

eduction wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually uv retains compatibility with the setup.py “insanity,” according to the article: > uv parses TOML and wheel metadata natively, only spawning Python when it hits a setup.py-only package that has no other option The article implies that pip also prefers toml and wheel metadata, but has to shell out to parse those, unlike uv.

Ugh. Thank you for the correction. :(

I mean, you’re on the right track in that they did cut out other insanity. But unclear how much of the speed up is necessarily tied to breaking backward compat (are there a lot of “.egg” files in the wild?)

Re: How uv got so fast

#185

Post by optionalsquid » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 1:51 AM UTC

xvector wrote: post #181

Nextgrid wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office politics happen when people determine they can get more money by engaging in politics instead of working. This is just an indicator people aren't being paid enough money (since people politicking around is detrimental to the company, it is better off paying them whatever it takes for them not to engage in such behavior). "You get what you pay for" applies yet again.

Hard disagree, most of my coworkers make well north of $1M and office politics is at an all time high. I believe office politics happens when there are simply too many people at a company or org.

Office politics happen when the number of people at an office exceeds 2

Re: How uv got so fast

#186

Post by IgorPartola » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 1:54 AM UTC

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #180

IgorPartola wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is also a systems language. I am still wrapping my mind around why it is so popular for so many end projects when its main use case and goals were basically writing a browser a maybe OS drivers. But that’s precisely why it is good for developer tools. And it turns out people who write systems code are really damn good at writing tools code. As someone who cut my teeth on C and low level systems stuff I really ou…

If python's painpoints don't bother you enough (or you are already comfortable with all the workarounds,) then I'm not sure Rust will do much for you. What I like about Rust is ADTs, pattern matching, execution speed. The things that really give me confidence are error handling (right balance between "you can't accidentally ignore errors" of checked exceptions with easy escape hatches for when you want to YOLO,) and…

I rarely if ever encounter bugs that type checking would have fixed. Most common types of bugs for me are things like forgetting that two different code paths access a specific type of database record and when they do both need to do something special to keep data cohesive. Or things like concurrency. Or worst of all things like fragile subprocesses (ffmpeg does not like being controlled by a supervisor process). I think all in all I have encountered about a dozen bugs in Python that were due to wrong types over the past 17 years of writing code in this language. Maybe slightly more than that in JS. The reason I would switch is performance.

Re: How uv got so fast

#187

Post by Nextgrid » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 1:55 AM UTC

xvector wrote: post #181

Nextgrid wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office politics happen when people determine they can get more money by engaging in politics instead of working. This is just an indicator people aren't being paid enough money (since people politicking around is detrimental to the company, it is better off paying them whatever it takes for them not to engage in such behavior). "You get what you pay for" applies yet again.

Hard disagree, most of my coworkers make well north of $1M and office politics is at an all time high. I believe office politics happens when there are simply too many people at a company or org.

I think too many people happens because a company would rather hire 10 "market rate" people than 3 well-compensated ones. Headcount inflation dilutes responsibility and rewards, so even if one of the "market rate" guys does the best work possible they won't get rewarded proportionally... so if hard work isn't going to get them adequate comp, maybe politics will.

Re: How uv got so fast

#188

Post by morshu9001 » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 2:09 AM UTC

edoceo wrote: post #153

orliesaurus wrote: post #148

The most surprising part of uv's success to me isn't Rust at all, it's how much speed we "unlocked" just by finally treating Python packaging as a well-specified systems problem instead of a pile of historical accidents. If uv had been written in Go or even highly optimized CPython, but with the same design decisions (PEP 517/518/621/658 focus, HTTP range tricks, aggressive wheel-first strategy, ignoring obviously de…

Consensus building and figuring out what was actually needed? Someone on this site said most tech problems are people problems - this feels like one. Greenfield mostly solves the problem because it's all new people.

I can't find the quote for this, but I remember Python maintainers wanted package installing and management to be separate things. uv did the opposite, and instead it's more like npm.

Re: How uv got so fast

#189

Post by est » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 2:10 AM UTC

> Virtual environments required

This bothers me more than once when building a base docker image. Why would I want a venv inside a docker with root?

Re: How uv got so fast

#190

Post by morshu9001 » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 2:15 AM UTC

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

One weird case where this mattered to me, I wanted pip to backtrack to find compatible versions of a set of deps, and it wasn't done after waiting a whole hour. uv did the same thing in 5 minutes. This might be kinda common because of how many Python repos out there don't have pinned versions in dependencies.txt.