TL;DR: uv is an extremely fast Python package manager, written in Rust.

  • __init__@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    Obligatory “there are now 15 competing standards”

    For real though, this looks interesting. I am a long time poetry user, I’ve been mostly happy with it but I do think it could stand to be a little faster. I’ll have to try this out sometime.

      • __init__@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        What’s that mean, like they aim to become a drop-in replacement for poetry too? Or make uv able to work with a poetry-style pyproject.toml? I couldn’t find any info about that.

        • dallen@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          Hmm, I just re-read the blog post and GitHub where I thought I read that and I think I was mistaken…

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    uv is fantastic. I would highly recommend it. I’ve used it in a quite complex environment, with no issues (quite an achievement!) and it’s about 10x faster than pip.

    I mean… I guess it’s not surprising given uv is written in Rust and pip is written in Python, but even so given pip is surely IO bound I was expecting something like 4x improvement. 10x is impressive.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      The actual dependency resolution part, so where you figure out which versions of the dependencies can be used together, is actually notoriously CPU-bound.

      At least as far as I’m aware, you generally use a SAT solver for dependency resolution (unless you don’t care for correctness), and as Wikipedia puts it:

      Boolean satisfiability is an NP-complete problem in general. As a result, only algorithms with exponential worst-case complexity are known.

      There are quite sophisticated algorithms at this point, making use of heuristics and whatnot, but they’re still just backtracking algorithms at their core. And as Wikipedia puts it so fittingly again:

      backtracking is often much faster than brute-force enumeration

      You know shit’s inefficient, when the best thing to compare it to, is just randomly trying solutions.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        you generally use a SAT solver for dependency resolution (unless you don’t care for correctness)

        Actually Go’s dependency system is specifically designed to avoid the need for global constraint solvers. Go has the most modern and elegant dependency versioning system that I’m aware of. Python was designed before people realised that it’s dependency style was a mistake.

        https://research.swtch.com/vgo-principles

        • burntsushi@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          I’m on the uv team. I am quite partial to this approach as well. Alas, it’s difficult culturally to pull this off in a pre-existing ecosystem. And in the case of Python at least, it’s not totally clear to me that it would avoid the need for solving NP hard problems. See my other comment in this thread about simplifying PEP 508 marker expressions.

          Other than avoiding needing a SAT solver to resolve dependencies, the other thing I like about Go’s approach is that it makes it very difficult to “lie” about the dependencies you support. In a maximal environment, it’s very easy to “depend” on foo 1.0 but where you actually need foo 1.1 without issues appearing immediately.

          • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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            4 months ago

            Oo hello. Didn’t know that’s what you were doing these days! Hope it goes well, though I’d be nervous about a realistic business plan.

            Anyway, yeah bit too late for Python.

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    Having used it for work, I really don’t understand the appeal, especially when compared to tools like Poetry. Uv persists in the dependency on requirements.txt, doesn’t streamline the publishing process, and contrary to the claims, it’s not a drop-in replacement for pip, as the command line API is different.

    It’s really fast, which is nice if you’re working on a nightmare codebase with 3000 dependencies, but most of us aren’t, and Poetry is pretty damned fast.

    If uv offered some of what Poetry does for me, if at the very least we could finally do away with requirements.txt and adopt something more useable – baked into pyproject.toml of course – then I’d be sold. But this is just faster pip.

    • uthredii@programming.devOP
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      4 months ago

      Early on uv was only trying to replace pip. This latest update is a big step towards becoming a poetry (and pyenv/pipx) replacement too.

    • The Doctor@beehaw.org
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      4 months ago

      It’s written in Rust.

      All jokes about the Rust Evangelism Strike Force aside, various parts of the industry are finally starting to think that “If it’s written in Rust, we have less to worry about with respect to that thing, so we won’t torture the devs and force them to sneak it in the side door anyway.”

      It’s a thing that I’ve been seeing at work for the last few years.

    • taaz@biglemmowski.win
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      4 months ago

      Uv is currently only a pip replacement as a dependency resolver (and downloader), it was actually adopted by astral from a different dev afaik

    • stilgar [he/him]
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      4 months ago

      Their vision is to evolve it into a “Cargo for Python”, so it’s coming.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    uv is now capable of installing and managing Python itself, making it entirely self-bootstrapping:

    Looking forward to this. One of the blind spots of poetry was to ignore the issue of managing python versions themselves. I’m happy to see they’re covering so many aspects of dependency management and replicability.

  • hades@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • chrash0@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        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…

        • chrash0@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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

          • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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            4 months ago

            they wouldn’t have made a different tool altogether if it was really a 1:1 replacement

            Why not? It’s 10x faster.

            I think it might have some other new features but you don’t need to use those.

            i doubt one person on the team could be using uv while everyone else sticks to pip

            This is exactly what we do at work. There’s no way I could convince everyone to switch to uv so I just switch between them based on an environment variable.

            It even supports random stuff like pip install --config-settings editable_mode=compat --editable foo which is required for static tooling to work (e.g. Pyright).

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      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.

        • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          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 Doctor@beehaw.org
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            4 months ago

            No, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for explaining.

            I like hearing about other people’s environments, because it gives perspective.

    • Solemarc@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • Midnitte@beehaw.org
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      4 months ago

      I think the main focus is around building out the tool chain - I would think being fast is just a side benefit and the main benefit is being written as the same language as what they want to use for the rest of “cargo”

  • ahal@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    This is incredible. Truly hats off to the folks at Astral. Can’t wait to try all this out and replace all our old bespoke tooling.

  • henfredemars
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    4 months ago

    Very impressive results. I think I’ll give the tool a try next time we’re working on a small project. I’m dissatisfied with the existing packaging solutions.

  • proton_lynx@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Isn’t uv being used as a package manager/resolver in rye? I’m using rye for my new projects and it’s nice because ruff and pytest are being unified in it too.