I had a recent period in my programming career where I started to actually believe that the "worse is better" philosophy is true in practice. It was a dark period and thankfully the existence of tools like uv save me from that abyss.
Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
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Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#92I 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…
It would be nice indeed if there was a good solution to multi-gigabyte conda directories. Conda has been reproducible in my experience with pinned dependencies in the environment YAML... slow to build, sure, but reproducible.
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#93Am I the only one who feels like this is obviated by Docker? uv is a clear improvement over pip and venv, for sure. But I do everything in dev containers these days. Very few things get to install on my laptop itself outside a container. I've gotten so used to this that tools that uninstall/install packages on my box on the fly give me the heebie-jeebies.
uv can be used to speed up building containers.
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#94I must be the odd man out but I am not a fan of uv. 1. It tries to do too many things. Please just do one thing and do it well. It's simultaneously trying to replace pip, pyenv, virtualenv, and ruff in one command. 2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip. 3. It does not play well with Docker. 4. It adds more complexity. You end up needing to understand all of these new enviro…
> 2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip. Needing pip and virtualenvs was enough to make me realize uv wasn't what I was looking for. If I still need to manage virtualenvs and call pip I'm just going to do so with both of these directly. I had been hoping someone would introduce the non-virtualenv package management solution that every single other language has where there's…
> I had been hoping someone would introduce the non-virtualenv package management solution that every single other language has where there's a dependency list and version requirements (including of the language itself) in a manifest file (go.mod, package.json, etc) and everything happens in the context of that directory alone without shell shenanigans.
Isn't that exactly a pyproject.toml via the the uv add/sync/run interface? What is that missing that you need?
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#95I'm surprised by how much I prefer prepending "uv" to everything instead of activating environments - which is still naturally an option if that's what floats your boat. I also like how you can manage Python versions very easily with it. Everything feels very "batteries-included" and yet local to the project. I still haven't used it long enough to tell whether it avoids the inevitable bi-yearly "debug a Python enviro…
> how much I prefer prepending "uv" to everything instead of activating environments
You can also prepend the path to the virtual environment's bin/ (or Scripts/ on Windows). Literally all that "activating an environment" does is to manipulate a few environment variables. Generally, it puts the aforementioned directory on the path, sets $VIRTUAL_ENV to the venv root, configures the prompt (on my system that means modifying $PS1) as a reminder, and sets up whatever's necessary to undo the changes (on my system that means defining a "deactivate" function; others may have a separate explicit script for that).
I personally don't like the automatic detection of venvs, or the pressure to put them in a specific place relative to the project root.
> I also like how you can manage Python versions very easily with it.
I still don't understand why people value this so highly, but so it goes.
> the inevitable bi-yearly "debug a Python environment day"
If you're getting this because you have venvs based off the system Python and you upgrade the system Python, then no, uv can't do anything about that. Venvs aren't really designed to be relocated or to have their underlying Python modified. But uv will make it much faster to re-create the environment, and most likely that will be the practical solution for you.
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#96I haven't tried uv yet, but I did use it's precursor - rye.
I had to update some messy python code and I was looking for a tool that could handle python versions, package updates, etc. with the least amount of documentation needing be read and troubleshooting.
Rye was that for me! Next time I write python I'm definitely going to use uv.
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#97I 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…
I work professionally in ML and have not had to touch conda in the last 7 years. In an ML cluster, it is hopefully containerized and there is no need for that?
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#98Yes, uv is probably the best thing to happen to the Py ecosystem in the last decade. That is mainly because the rest of the ecosystem is somewhere between garbage fire and mediocre at best.
uv in itself is a great tool, I have no complaints about it whatsoever! But we have to remember just how bad the rest of things are and never forget that everything's still in a pretty bad state even after more than 3 ** DECADES ** of constant evolution.
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#99[flagged]
woah no way, dude. cool
Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
#100I must be the odd man out but I am not a fan of uv. 1. It tries to do too many things. Please just do one thing and do it well. It's simultaneously trying to replace pip, pyenv, virtualenv, and ruff in one command. 2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip. 3. It does not play well with Docker. 4. It adds more complexity. You end up needing to understand all of these new enviro…
> It tries to do too many things. Please just do one thing and do it well.
I disagree with this principle. Sometimes what I need is a kitset. I don't want to go shopping for things, or browse multiple docs. I just want it taken care of for me. I don't use uv so I don't know if the pieces fit together well but the kitset can work well and so can a la carte.