TL;DR: uv is an extremely fast Python package manager, written in Rust.
Is that a real problem? I’ve never considered that a python package manager should be or could be faster.
To be fair, I don’t use python professionally.
definitely not the real reason for a project like this to exist. Python package management can be nightmarish at times depending on what you’re doing. between barebones requirements.txt, Poetry, and the different condas there’s a ton of fragmentation, and none of them do everything you’d want in an ideal way. above and beyond speed, i think uv is another attempt at it. but it could just be another classic xkcd moment where now there’s just another standard to deal with
uv is a drop-in replacement for pip. There’s no extra standard. It’s pareto better. Honestly the Python community would do the world a favour if the deprecated pip and adopted uv as the official tool, but you can guess how likely that is…
as you might have guessed i haven’t really tried it, but i have been reading about it. that said i have used “drop in replacement” tools like this (we use pnpm at work), and a drop in replacement is not without quirks. they wouldn’t have made a different tool altogether if it was really a 1:1 replacement. just because the commands are the same doesn’t mean it behaves the same. i.e. i doubt one person on the team could be using uv while everyone else sticks to pip
Yes. For the project I work on pip install takes about 60 seconds and replacing it with uv reduces that to about 7 seconds. That’s a very significant improvement. Much less annoying interactively and in CI we do this multiple times so it saves a significant chunk of time.
I dunno maybe once a week or so? We don’t actually have a system that detects if your pip install is out of sync with pyproject.toml yet so I run it occasionally just to make sure.
And it runs in CI around a dozen times for each PR. Yeah not ideal but there are goodish reasons which I can explain if you want.
The performance is just a “nice to have”.
Python package management, especially at scale is infuriating. At work we use python microservices in docker containers and it infuriates me trying to update the one our team is responsible for.
I always like to rant that python 3rd party package management tools are a mistake. We should’ve gone for an “as simple as possible” setup instead of all this.
So I’m sceptical of UV on principle since it’s yet another 3rd party package manager but if it can do all of this and not be a nightmare I’ll be ok with it.
