341–350 of 468 posts
One small timeline nit: the article mentions PEP 517 as being from 2017, but the PEP itself was created in 2015. From the PEP header:
Created: 30-Sep-2015 [1]
It did see important revisions and wider adoption around 2017, so I assume that’s what was meant.
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Linux systems commonly already provide an outdated system Python you don’t want to use, and it can’t be used to create a venv of a version you want to use. A single Python version for the entire system fundamentally doesn’t work for many people thanks to shitty compat story in the vast ecosystem. Even languages with great compat story are moving to support multi-toolchains natively. For instance, go 1.22 on Ubuntu 24…
Why not just use a Python container rather than rely on having the latest binary installed on the system? Then venv inside the container. That would get you the “venv of a version” that you are referring to
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Note that the advantages of Rust are not just execution speed: it's also a good language for expressing one's thoughts, and thus makes it easier to find and unlock the algorithmic speedups that really increase speed. But yeah. Python packaging has been dumb for decades and successive Python package managers recapitulated the same idiocies over and over. Anyone who had used both Python and a serious programming langua…
Cargo is not really good. The very much non-zero frequency of something with cargo not working for opaque reasons and then suddenly working again after "cargo clean", the "no, I invoke your binaries"-mentality (try running a benchmark without either ^C'ing out of bench to copy the binary name or parsing some internal JSON metadata) because "cargo build" is the only build system in the world which will never tell you…
`Vec::spare_capacity_mut`[1] gives you a view into the unused capacity. There's nothing "invalid" about it.
[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/vec/struct.Vec.html#method.spa...
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If I want to install Python on Windows and start using pip, I grab an installer from python.org and follow a wizard. On Linux, I almost certainly already have it anyway. If I want to bootstrap from uv on Windows, the simplest option offered involves Powershell. Either way, I can write quite a bit with just the standard library before I have to understand what uv really is (or what pip is). At that point, yes, the pip…
Not many normal people want to install python. Instead, author of the software they are trying to use wants them to install python. So they follow readme, download windows installer as you say, pip this pipx, pipx that conda, conda this requirements.txt, and five minutes later they have magic error telling that tensorflow version they are installing is not compatible with pytorch version they are installing or some s…
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There are a handful of things in TFA that, while not outright false, are sloppy enough that I'd expect someone knowledgeable to know/explain better.
I didn't notice that - can you give some examples?
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> the conversation here keeps collapsing back to "Rust rewrite good/bad." That feels like cargo-culting the toolchain instead of asking the uncomfortable question: why did it take a greenfield project to give Python the package manager behavior people clearly wanted for the last decade? I think there's a few things going on here: - If you're going have a project that's obsessed with speed, you might as well use rust/…
> the entire python ecosystem generally does not put much emphasis on startup time. You'd think PyPy would be more popular, then. > even modules in the standard library will pre-compile regular expressions at import time, even if they're never used, like the "email" module. Hmm, that is slower than I realized (although still just a fraction of typical module import time): $ python -m timeit --setup 'import re' 're.co…
Hah. Yes sounds like we are very much on the same page here. Python stdlib could really use a simple generic email/http header parser.
> It's unusual that you actually need to install Python again after initially having "python+dependencies installed".
I’m thinking about 3rd party installers like poetry, pip-tools, pdm, etc, where your installer needs python+dependencies installed before it can start installing.
> “write a pretty fast implementation using python” This is my current main project btw. (No, I don't really care that uv already exists. I'll have to blog about why.)
Do you have anything public yet? I’m totally curious. I started doing this for flake8 and pip back in 2021/2022, but when ruff+uv came along I figured it wasn’t worth my time any more.
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Why not just use a Python container rather than rely on having the latest binary installed on the system? Then venv inside the container. That would get you the “venv of a version” that you are referring to
'we can't ship the Python version you want for your OS so we'll ship the whole OS' is a solution, but the 'we can't' part was embarrassing in 2015 already.
Many Linux distributions ship Python. Alpine and DSL don’t. You can add it to Alpine. If you want the latest, you install it.
Other design decisions that made uv fast: - uncompressing packages while they are still being downloaded, in memory, so that you only have to write to disk once - design of its own locking format for speed But yes, rust is actually making it faster because: - real threads, no need for multi-processing - no python VM startup overhead - the dep resolution algo is exactly the type of workload that is faster in a compile…
> uncompressing packages while they are still being downloaded ... but the archive directory is at the end of the file? > no python VM startup overhead This is about 20 milliseconds on my 11-year-old hardware.
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