Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

emily.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#541

Post by pansa2 »

Jaxkr wrote: post #520
ederamen wrote: post #517

Uv is so good. I'm a curmudgeon about adopting new tooling, and tried uv with a lot of skepticism, but it was just better in every way. And even if it wasn't so polished and reliable, the raw speed makes it hard to go back to any other tool. Uv combined with type hints reaching critical mass in the Python ecosystem, and how solid PyLance is in VSCode, feels so good it has made me consider investing in Python as my pr…

On performance: 3.13 removed the GIL and added experimental first-party JIT (like PyPy). In two years I bet we’ll be seeing v8 level performance out of CPython.

The “Faster CPython” team were let go from Microsoft because they could only produce a 1.5x speedup in four years instead of the planned 5x.

It’s wildly optimistic to now expect a 10x speedup in two years, with fewer resources.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#542

Post by morshu9001 »

verdverm wrote: post #11

I'd put type annotations and GIL removal above UV without a second thought. UV is still young and I hit some of those growing pains. While it is very nice, I'm not going to put it up there with sliced bread, it's just another package manager among many

I don't want type annotations. Was kinda the point of Python not to deal with types.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#543

Post by tiltowait »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #149

I gotta say, I feel pretty vindicated after hearing for years how Python’s tooling was just fine and you should just use virtualenv with pip and how JS must be worse, that when Python devs finally get a taste of npm/cargo/bundler in their ecosystem, they freaking love it. Because yes, npm has its issues but lock files and consistent installs are amazing

I don't know, Poetry's existed for years, and people still use requirements.txt. Uv is great but isn't exactly unique in Python-land.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#544

Post by zelphirkalt »

WatchDog wrote: post #421
anp wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be worth noting that npm didn’t have lock files for quite a long time, which is the era during which I formed my mental model of npm hell. The popularity of yarn (again importing bundled/cargo-isms) seems like maybe the main reason npm isn’t as bad as it used to be.

Lock files are only needed because of version ranging. Maven worked fine without semantic versioning and lock files. Edit: Changed "semantic versioning" to "version ranging"

If in some supply chain attack someone switches out a version's code under your seating apparatus, then good look without lock files. I for one prefer being notified about checksums of things suddenly changing.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#545

Post by morshu9001 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #131
xmprt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your implication is that pyenv, virtualenv, and pip should be 3 different tools. But for the average developer, these tools are all related to managing the python environment and versions which in my head sounds like one thing. Other languages don't have 3 different tools for this. pip and virtualenv also add a ton of complexity and when they break (which happens quite often) debugging it is even harder despite them…

Yeah, I agree. In particular it seems insane to me that virtualenv should have to exist. I can't see any valid use case for a machine-global pool of dependencies. Why would anyone think it should be a separate tool rather than just the obvious thing that a dependency manager does? I say this as someone with nearly 20 years of Python experience. It's the same sort of deal with pyenv--the Python version is itself a dep…

And in practice it usually ends up being 6 different machine-global pools that all weirdly intersect, and some are python2.

I started using NodeJS more after lots of Python experience. Packages make so much more sense there. Even imports. You know how hard it is to do the equivalent of "require '../foo.js'" in Python?

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#546

Post by wraptile »

tiltowait wrote: post #543
hardwaregeek wrote: post #149

I gotta say, I feel pretty vindicated after hearing for years how Python’s tooling was just fine and you should just use virtualenv with pip and how JS must be worse, that when Python devs finally get a taste of npm/cargo/bundler in their ecosystem, they freaking love it. Because yes, npm has its issues but lock files and consistent installs are amazing

I don't know, Poetry's existed for years, and people still use requirements.txt. Uv is great but isn't exactly unique in Python-land.

Yeah I use poetry, uv and requirements.txt - all great tools for their respective niches.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#547

Post by collinmanderson »

cidd wrote: post #477
senderista wrote: post #462

It’s puzzling why Python became the de facto standard scripting language rather than Ruby when the tooling was so inferior.

AI/ML

> AI/ML

The Machine-Learning world, especially "Google Brain" research team figured out that NumPy was an awesome piece of software for dealing with large arrays of numbers and matrix multiplication. They built "TensorFlow" on top of it around 2015 which became very popular. Facebook followed suit and released PyTorch in 2016.

IPython/Jupiter notebooks (for Julia, Python and R) from 2015 were another factor, also adopted by the AI/ML community.

The alternative data-science languages at the time were Mathematica, MATLAB, SAS, Fortran, Julia, R, etc, but Python probably won because it was general purpose and open source.

I suspect Python would not have survived the 2/3 split very well if it wasn't for AI/ML adopting Python as its main language.

> when the tooling was so inferior

Since 2012, Conda/Anaconda has been the go-to installer in the SciPy/NumPy world which also solves a lot of problems that uv solves.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#548

Post by hshdhdhehd »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #247
caconym_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing I dread more within the general context of software development, broadly , than trying to run other people's Python projects. Nothing. It's shocking that it has been so bad for so long.

Never underestimate cultural momentum I guess. NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2. Doctors refused to wash their hands before doing procedures. There’s so many things that seem obvious in retrospect but took a long time to become accepted

Hey and you can use both lanes in a zip merge!

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#549

Post by zelphirkalt »

collinmanderson wrote: post #536
zelphirkalt wrote: post #528

From the article: > uv is an incredibly powerful simplification for us that we use across our entire tech stack. As developers, we can all work with identical Python installations, which is especially important given a number of semi-experimental dependencies that we use that have breaking changes with every version. On GitHub Actions, we’re planning to use uv to quickly build a Python environment and run our unit te…

> I can only conclude, that the author of the article, and perhaps even the organization they work in, is unaware of other tools that did the job long before uv. If they really value reproducibility that much, how come they didn't look into the matter before? Things much have been really hastily stitched together, if no one ever looked at existing tooling before, and only now they make things reproducible. Yes, Poetr…

Doesn't really explain, how their organization apparently ran around without proper lock files before, when they are a researcher. If anything, then this article is shining light on the previously bad state of project setup in the organization.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#550

Post by metmac »

UV and the crew at Astral really moved the Python packaging community forward.

I would love to see them compete with the likes of Conda and try to handle the Python C extension story.

But in the interim, I agree with everyone else who has already commented, Pixi which is partly built atop of UV’s solver is an even bigger deal and I think the longer term winner here.

Having a topologically complete package manager who can speak Conda and PyPi, is amazing.

https://pixi.sh/latest/

Post reply on HN