- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
TL;DR: uv is an extremely fast Python package manager, written in Rust.
- __init__ ( @__init__@programming.dev ) 33•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.
- dallen ( @dallen@programming.dev ) 2•4 months ago
Poetry support is on their roadmap!
- __init__ ( @__init__@programming.dev ) 2•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 ( @dallen@programming.dev ) 2•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 ( @FizzyOrange@programming.dev ) 13•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 ( @Ephera@lemmy.ml ) 9•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.
- burntsushi ( @burntsushi@programming.dev ) English8•4 months ago
Interestingly, dependency resolution is not the only NP hard problem uv tries to solve. During development, it also became clear that we needed some way to simplify PEP 508 marker expressions and ask questions like, “are these marker expressions disjoint?”
- FizzyOrange ( @FizzyOrange@programming.dev ) 3•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.
- burntsushi ( @burntsushi@programming.dev ) English6•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 needfoo 1.1
without issues appearing immediately.- FizzyOrange ( @FizzyOrange@programming.dev ) 3•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 ( @danielquinn@lemmy.ca ) English10•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.
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 ( @drwho@beehaw.org ) English1•4 months ago
Now if they could just help defuckulate the Pypi search problem.
- The Doctor ( @drwho@beehaw.org ) English5•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.
- burntsushi ( @burntsushi@programming.dev ) English5•4 months ago
uv 0.3 introduces a cross platform lock file: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/#lockfile
More precise details on the compatibility of
uv pip
withpip
are documented here: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/pip/compatibility/ - taaz ( @taaz@biglemmowski.win ) English4•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] ( @stilgar@infosec.pub ) English2•4 months ago
Their vision is to evolve it into a “Cargo for Python”, so it’s coming.
- ahal ( @ahal@lemmy.ca ) 7•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.
- hades ( @hades@lemm.ee ) 6•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.
- FizzyOrange ( @FizzyOrange@programming.dev ) 9•4 months ago
Yes. For the project I work on
pip install
takes about 60 seconds and replacing it withuv
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.- The Doctor ( @drwho@beehaw.org ) English1•4 months ago
Just out of curiosity, how often do you have to run
pip install
?- FizzyOrange ( @FizzyOrange@programming.dev ) 4•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 withpyproject.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 ( @drwho@beehaw.org ) English3•4 months ago
No, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for explaining.
I like hearing about other people’s environments, because it gives perspective.
- Midnitte ( @Midnitte@beehaw.org ) English2•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”
- henfredemars ( @henfredemars@infosec.pub ) English4•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.
- ericjmorey ( @ericjmorey@programming.dev ) 2•4 months ago
This is great!
@burntsushi@programming.dev, do you know is Astral is working with prefix.dev and their Pixi project? They seem to now have overlapping concerns.
I don’t think they have anything to do with each other, it looks like prefix.dev uses conda packages.
- ericjmorey ( @ericjmorey@programming.dev ) 2•4 months ago
Conda is their primary focus, but they support well more than conda packages.