[heisig]

I recently switched to uv, and I cannot praise it enough. With uv, the Python ecosystem finally feels mature and polished rather than like a collection of brittle hacks.

Kudos to the uv developers for creating such an amazing piece of software!

[matsemann]

Yeah, switched to writing python professionally ~4 years ago, and been low key hating the ecosystem. From a java and javascript background, it's mostly been npm/mvn install and it "just works". With python, there's always someone being onboarded that can't get it to work. So many small issues. Have to have the correct version per project, then have to get the venv running. And then installing it needs to build stuff because there's no wheel, so need to set up a complete c++ and rust toolchain etc., just to pull a small project and run it.

uv doesn't solve all this, but it's reduced the amount of ways things can go wrong by a lot. And it being fast means that the feedback-loop is much quicker.

[gunalx]

I cannot share the same experiences. mvn is a buggy mess, randomly forgetting dependencies, and constantly needing a full clean to not die on itself. npm and the entire js ecosystem feels so immature with constant breaking changes, and circular dependency hell, when trying to uppgrade stuff.

[notpushkin]

Python has been mostly working okay for me since I switched to Poetry. (“Mostly” because I think I’ve run into some weird issue once but I’ve tried to recall what it was and I just can’t.)

uv felt a bit immature at the time, but sounds like it’s way better now. I really want to try it out... but Poetry just works, so I don’t really have an incentive to switch just yet. (Though I’ve switched from FlakeHeaven or something to Ruff and the difference was heaven and hell! Pun in’tended.)

[Wulfheart]

Ok, you convinced me to give it a try. Tbh, I am a casual user of python and I don't want to touch it unless I have a damn good reason to use it.

[mlnj]

You do not need a damn good reason for this. Just try it out on a simple hello world. Then try it out on a project already using poetry for eg.

uv init

uv sync

and you're done

I'd say if you do not run into the pitfalls of a large python codebase with hundreds of dependencies, you'll not get the bigger argument people are talking about.

[jorvi]

> I am a casual user of python and I don't want to touch it unless I have a damn good reason to use it.

I... what? Python is a beautiful way to evolve beyond the troglodyte world of sh for system scripts. You are seriously missing out by being so pertinently against it.

[ffsm8]

Now, if I hadn't read literally the same message for Pipenv/Pipfile and poetry before, too...

Python is going through package managers like JS goes through trends like classes-everywhere, hooks, signals etc

[OutOfHere]

There have been incremental evolutionary improvements that were brought forth by each of the packages you named. uv just goes a lot further than the previous one. There have been others that deserve an honorary mention, e.g. pip-tools, pdm, hatch, etc. It's going to be very hard for anything to top uv.

[amelius]

But how does it work with components that require libraries written in C?

And what if there are no binaries yet for my architecture, will it compile them, including all the dependencies written in C?

[matrss]

IMO if you require libraries in other languages then a pure python package manager like uv, pip, poetry, whatever, is simply the wrong tool for the job. There is _some_ support for this through wheels, and I'd expect uv to support them just as much as pip does, but they feel like a hack to me.

Instead there is pixi, which is similar in concept to uv but for the conda-forge packaging ecosystem. Nix and guix are also language-agnostic package managers that can do the job.

[dagw]

UV is not (yet) a build system and does not get involved with compiling code. But easily lets you plug in any build system you want. So it will let you keep using whatever system you are currently using for building your C libraries. For example I use scikit-build-core for building all of my libraries C and C++ components with cmake and it works fine with uv.

[sirfz]

Yes it'll build any dependency that has no binary wheels (or you explicitly pass --no-binary) as long as said package supports it (i.e. via setup.py/pyproject.toml build-backend). Basically, just like pip would

[freeamz]

What about using https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython also?

[the_mitsuhiko]

Unlike uv this tool is unlikely to solve problems for the average Python user and most likely will create new ones.