Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade • Hacker News Board

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

#851

Post by rldjbpin » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:00 PM UTC

either conda is that old now or it seems a bit of a hyperbole.

haven used it personally, uv is quite fast and nice to work with at first. definitely nice if you work in a team that fully utilise its potential. however, there felt a lot of parallels with the node.js universe and switching to .venv / localized environments bloats up the system when you work with a boilerplate env that is the same across projects.

the additional files generated are also less human-readable compared to a requirements.txt and the workflow felt a bit more involved for individual users imho. it definitely has a place in the ecosystem, but personally don't find it ready to replace everything else yet.

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

#852

Post by bgwalter » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:03 PM UTC

hexbin010 wrote: post #840

I predict it'll be the best and then the 'worst' thing: they'll go hard on monetisation. Just look at this post: 1839 points and 1048 comments! That is insane. It's captured the hearts and minds of Python devs and I'm sure they know it. I'm not against projects making money, just remember you'll likely pay a price later on once you invest in more of Astral's ecosystem. It's just temporarily free.

It has always been like this. The only way to get glory and money in the Python space [1] is to set up a new package manager or package repository or both.

Active State, Enthought, Anaconda, now Astral.

[1] Discounting pure SaaS companies that just use Python but offer no tools.

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

#853

Post by zelphirkalt » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

bschwindHN wrote: post #586

1718627440 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, Python has essentially solved it for years.

lol no it hasn't Why else is this discussion getting hundreds of comments? For any random python tool out there, I had about a 60% chance it would work out of the box. uv is the first tool in the python ecosystem that has brought that number basically to 100%. Ironically, it's written in Rust because python does not lend itself well to distributing reliable, fast tools to end users.

It comes up again and again, because people don't realize that solutions already exist(ed) and they don't spend the time to figure things out.

I have managed reproducible Python services and software for multiple years now. This was solved already before uv, although uv does it faster and maybe offers a bit more comfort, although I abstract away such tooling using a simple Makefile anyway.

The reason you are having such a bad time getting random Python projects to work out of the box is, because people creating them did not spend the effort to make them reproducible, meaning, that they do not ensure the setup has same versions and checksums of every direct and transitive dependency. This can be facilitated using various tools these days. poetry, uv, and I am sure there are more. People are just clueless and think that a requirements.txt file with a few loose versions slung in is sufficient. It is not, and you end up with not working project setups like in those cases you refer to.

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

#854

Post by lijok » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

hexbin010 wrote: post #844

lijok wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve been very transparent about their monetization strategy and it does not impact uv’s foss model

That's just marketing. Only time will tell. I'll be very happy to be wrong

The time has come. They’re in closed beta with pyx, their first product they’re charging for.

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

#855

Post by dundercoder » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

bgwalter wrote: post #852

hexbin010 wrote: post #840

I predict it'll be the best and then the 'worst' thing: they'll go hard on monetisation. Just look at this post: 1839 points and 1048 comments! That is insane. It's captured the hearts and minds of Python devs and I'm sure they know it. I'm not against projects making money, just remember you'll likely pay a price later on once you invest in more of Astral's ecosystem. It's just temporarily free.

It has always been like this. The only way to get glory and money in the Python space [1] is to set up a new package manager or package repository or both. Active State, Enthought, Anaconda, now Astral. [1] Discounting pure SaaS companies that just use Python but offer no tools.

Active state, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.

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

#856

Post by leephillips » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

wjholden wrote: post #715

miki123211 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we had a language that had the syntax of Python (notably including operator overloading, which is absolutely critical for neural networks, ML, data science and numerical computations), the performance, compile times and concurrency support of Go, the type system flexibility of Typescript, and the native platform integration of C/C++.

I think Julia largely accomplishes these goals except for the platform integration.

All except maybe the compile times. I read the beginning of the article about the features of Uv; Julia has all that built in.

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

#857

Post by limagnolia » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

hexbin010 wrote: post #840

I predict it'll be the best and then the 'worst' thing: they'll go hard on monetisation. Just look at this post: 1839 points and 1048 comments! That is insane. It's captured the hearts and minds of Python devs and I'm sure they know it. I'm not against projects making money, just remember you'll likely pay a price later on once you invest in more of Astral's ecosystem. It's just temporarily free.

It is open source. If they enshitify UV with monetization, it will be forked.

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

#858

Post by shevy-java » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:22 PM UTC

I am a bit skeptical.

You only have to look at the ruby ecosystem and the recent mass-expulsion of long-term developers from rubygems/bundler via RubyCentral going full corporate-mode ("we needs us some more moneeeeeys now ... all for the community!!!" - or something). While one COULD find pros in everything, is what is happening in different programming languages really better for both users and developers? I am not quite convinced here.

I am not saying the prior status quo was perfect. What I am saying is ... I am not quite convinced that the proposed benefits are real. In fact, I find managing multiple versions actually annoying. I should say that I already handle that via the GoboLinux way mostly (Name/Version/ going into a central directory; this is also similar what homebrew does, and also to some extent nixos, except that they store it via a unique hash which is less elegant. For instance, on GoboLinux I would then have /Programs/Ruby/3.3.0/ - that's about as simple as can possibly be). I really don't want a tool I don't understand to inject itself here and add more complications to that. My system is already quite simple and I don't really need anything it describes to me as "you need this". I also track and handle dependencies on my own. (This is more work to do initially, but past that point I just do "ue" on the commandline to update to the latest version, where ue is simply an alias to a ruby class called UpdateEntry, which in turn updates an entry in a .yml file, which then is used to populate a SQL database and also downloads and repackages and optionally compiles/installs the given package, e. g. "ue mesa" would just update mesa .tar.xz locally. I usually don't automatically compile it though, so "ue" I just use to update a program version or simply change it; it also accepts an URL of course so users can override this behaviour as they see fit.)

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

#859

Post by oblio » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

bgwalter wrote: post #852

hexbin010 wrote: post #840

I predict it'll be the best and then the 'worst' thing: they'll go hard on monetisation. Just look at this post: 1839 points and 1048 comments! That is insane. It's captured the hearts and minds of Python devs and I'm sure they know it. I'm not against projects making money, just remember you'll likely pay a price later on once you invest in more of Astral's ecosystem. It's just temporarily free.

It has always been like this. The only way to get glory and money in the Python space [1] is to set up a new package manager or package repository or both. Active State, Enthought, Anaconda, now Astral. [1] Discounting pure SaaS companies that just use Python but offer no tools.

Heh, Sonatype - Maven - Nexus, Gradle Inc - Gradle (both Java).

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

#860

Post by oblio » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #791

darkamaul wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think better developer tools tend to compound over time, they raise expectations and push the whole ecosystem forward. IMO, uv is quickly becoming one of the best reasons to start a new project in Python. It’s fast, and brings a level of polish and performance that makes Python feel modern again.

Indeed. It's interesting to compare the expectations of a new programming language today to just a decade ago for instance.

The funky thing is that people will fork uv and make package managers for other programming languages from it. Or at least from parts of it. Win win.