301–310 of 1001 posts
Can someone steelman the python tooling ecosystem for me? Having a new packaging / dependency manager every few years seems excessive.
The fact that it's a binary, not written in python, also simplifies bootstrapping. So you don't need python+dependencies installed in order to install your python+dependencies.
But what was wrong with pip, venv and pyproject.toml in the first place? I just keep a system installation of python for my personal things and an environment for every project I'm working on. I'd get suspicious if a developer is picky about python versions or library versions like what crazy programs are you writing?
Implementation-wise, there's nothing wrong in my view with venv. Or rather, everything is compelled to use virtual environments, including uv, and venv is just a simple tool for doing so manually. Pip, on the other hand, is slow and bulky due to poor architecture, a problem made worse by the expectation (you can work around it, but it requires additional understanding and setup, and isn't a perfect solution) of re-installing it into each virtual environment.
(The standard library venv defaults to such installation; you can disable this, but then you have to have a global pip set up, and you have to direct it to install into the necessary environment. One sneaky way to do this is to install Pipx, and then set up some script wrappers that use Pipx's vendored copy of pip. I describe my techniques for this in https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2025/01/07/python-packaging-....)
Edit: by "design" above I meant the broad strokes of how you use pip, installing single packages with their transitive dependencies etc. There's a lot I would change about the CLI syntax, and other design issues like that.
I hadn't paid any attention to rust before uv, but since starting to use uv, I've switched a lot of my performance-sensitive code dev to rust (with interfaces to python). These sorts of improvements really do improve my quality of life significantly. My hope is that conda goes away completely. I run an ML cluster and we have multi-gigabyte conda directories and researchers who can't reproduce anything because just to…
You might be interested in pixi, which is roughly to conda as uv is to pip (also written in Rust, it reuses the uv solver for PyPI packages)
It's still very immature but if you have a mixture of languages (C, C++, Python, Rust, etc.) I highly recommend checking it out.
> Instead of > > source .venv/bin/activate > python myscript.py > > you can just do > > > uv run myscript > This is by far the biggest turn off for me. The whole point of an environment manager is set the environment so that the commands I run work. They need to run natively how they are supposed to when the environment is set, not put through a translation layer. Side rant: yes I get triggered whenever someone tells…
From what I can tell (just started using uv) it doesn't break the original workflow with the venv, just adds the uv run option as well.
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I have used pip freeze > requirements.txt pip install -r requirements.txt Way before "official" lockfile existed. Your requirements.txt becomes a lockfile, as long as you accept to not use ranges. Having this in a single tool etc why not, but I don't understand this hype, when it was basically already there.
Good luck if you need cross-platform `requirements.txt` files.
Is there a way to install this that doesn't involve piping a random URL to my shell interpreter?
Or is it a corporate grab to gain more influence in the ecosystem? I like the idea, but for profit backing is out of the question. This lesson has been learned countless times.
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Webdev since 1998 here. Tabling the python vs JS/etc to comment on npm per se. PNPM is better than npm in every way. Strongest possible recommendation to use it instead of npm; it's faster, more efficient, safer, and more deterministic. See https://pnpm.io/motivation
I find pnpm annoying to type, that's why I don't use it
FWIW I use zsh with auto-auto-completion / auto-completion-as-you-type, so just hitting `p` on an empty command line will remember the most recent command starting with `p` (which was likely `pnpm`), and you can refine with further keystrokes and accept longer prefixes (like I always do that with `git add` to choose between typical ways to complete that statement). IMO people who don't use auto-completion are either people who have a magical ability to hammer text into their keyboards with the speed of light, or people who don't know about anything hence don't know about auto-completion, or terminally obsessive types who believe that only hand-crafting each line is worth while.
I don't know which type of person you are but since typing `pnpm` instead of `npm` bothers you to the degree you refuse to use `pnpm`, I assume you must be of the second type. Did you know you can alias commands? Did you know that no matter your shell it's straightforward to write shell scripts that do nothing but replace obnoxious command invocations with shorter ones? If you're a type 3 person then of course god forbid, no true hacker worth their salt will want to spoil the purity of their artisanal command line incantations with unnatural ersatz-commands, got it.