If it sold itself on its merits I don’t think we’d see all these fawning posts about it. It’s a Rust fan thing. You can see how any criticism gets treated. I’m sure it works for some people and obviously if it does, then great. But it’s got this same weird cult following and pretend talk of speed that lots of Rust stuff has. It’s getting a little tiring. If you like it, use it, evangelizing is obnoxious.
I'm not a Rustacean, but I'll tell you what merited me installing uv (via its MacPorts package) last week.
I had decided to do something via a one-off Python script. I wanted to use some Python packages for the script (like `progressbar2`). I decided to use Inline Script Metadata[0], so I could include the package dependencies at the top of the script.
I'm not using pipenv or poetry right now, and decided to give uv a try for this. So I did a `sudo port install uv`, followed by a `uv run myscript.py --arguments`. It worked fine, making & managing a venv somewhere. As I developed the script, adding & changing dependencies, the `uv run …` installed things as needed.
After everything was done, cleanup was via `uv cache clean`.
Will I immediately go and replace everything with uv? No. As I mentioned in another post, I'll probably next look at using uv in my CI runs. But I don't feel any need to rush.
Yeah, but it sold itself on its merrits. That is the point. Maybe venv and pip works fine for some toy projects that are deployed on the developer controlled OS without regular dependency updates, but let me assure you I had hours of fights with updating python services with complex needs on Debian boxes from various ages while ensuring whst I ran as a dev is the stuff that is guaranteed to run in production.
With uv it just works and that in a fraction of the time. Where before updates would mean to mentally prepare that a thing that should take 5 seconds in the best and 15 minutes in the worst case could occupy my whole day, it has now become very predictable.
I don't care what it is written in. It works. If you think people love it because it was written in some language it just means you never had a job where what uv brings was really needed and thus you can't really judge its usefulness.
Also one has to chuckle at the notion that re-writing package management in Rust is some kind of fanbois with hammers looking for nails activism. Rust is almost certainly the best option for this in the 2020s, especially for a package ecosystem as deranged as Python's.
By this point I feel reminded of a former collegue I ate lunch with, who would repeatedly make jokes about how "vegans constantly need to talk about their veganism". During our shared time he brought that topic up probably a hundred times, while the single time veganism was brought up by anybody was by a female intern after she was asked by him why she doesn't like to try the meat.
This is what reflexive criticism of Rust starts to feel like. I get that this somehow grinds some peoples gears, but come on. Who cares what it is written in if it is good software. And as someone who tried all major ways of dependency management in Python I have to say it is the best. Don't like that it is written in Rust for ideological reasons? Go ahead and write it better in C¹ or whatever.
¹: Nothing against C, I regularily use it for embedded programming, but it appears many of the loudest Rust allergics come from there
What’s more obnoxious is dismissing it as a rust fanboy conspiracy. Know what I like about it? `uv install .` with a few dozen top-level dependencies takes under a second on my machine. All the tools work as documented all the time. `uv run …` is nearly instant. Those are the reasons I like it.
I couldn’t care less that it’s written in rust. It could be conjured from malbolge for all I care. It works as advertised, whatever it’s written in.
I use golang, rust and c++ here and there, but majority of my time is spent working in Python projects. I'm not alien to the concept of speed and performance, especially the tooling around them.
While I like the idea of pip or uv to be insanely fast, I still don't see it revolutionize my development experience.
Installing and uninstalling package is not something I do every 1 to 10 minutes. It doesn't save me any much time. Also, activating a venv is once a session in terminal and sometime a week goes by without ever activating a venv, because the IDE does that automatically on whatever I do.
That's why, personally for me it really doesn't change much.
Where I like things being fast in my development time is pre-commit and linting, where ruff shines. Which that I also don't use, even though I work on a small-medium 600k LoC project, I only pass the changed files to isort, flake8 and black and it's all done in less than 5 seconds.
To me, the only advantage of uv is being fast, which is something I haven't been bothered with so far, where 99% of things happen in less than 1 or max couple of seconds.
Ever had customers deploy your project on 4 different debian versions without docker? Probably not, because there are problems lurking you didn't even know could exist. And 99% of them are gone with uv.
You don't have to believe the parts you made up. The comment you're replying to didn't actually state that a single customer was deploying to four different Debian versions. As written, the comment only requires you to believe that four Debian versions were in use collectively across the customer base.
Granted, but that is relevant to the point I made in which way?
In reality you will have people running different OS versions. Maybe not within one org, but across users? For sure. If you are not using containers for one reason or another uv has shown to be a very good, reliable and easy to use way of dealing with the issues like these.
Additionally it has some other benefits when it comes to dev dependecies etc. Not that you couldn't somehow manage without it, it just makes certain things so much less pain as they were.
The speed is nice. It’s not the only advantage, though. It’s so pleasant being able to `uv run [git-repo]` and having it work. The same design that makes it so fast makes it delightfully good at doing other complicated things.
As an occasional Python user that loves uv -- I do care that it's in Rust, because Rust enforces a separation between mutable and immutable state that consistently leads to higher-quality outcomes.
I don’t totally not care that it’s written in Rust. That means there are whole classes of bugs it won’t have, and it’s probably rigorous about data structure and state management.
