[bognition]

Honestly, I was skeptical when I learned about uv. I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years.

Then I gave it a try and it just worked! It’s so much better that I immediately moved all my Python projects to it.

[zahlman]

> I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years.

Pip, venv and virtualenvwrapper (people still use this?) are not meaningfully "dependency managers". A venv is just a place to put things, and pip does only basic tracking and tries to maintain a consistent environment. It isn't trying to help you figure out what dependencies you need, create new environments from scratch, update pyproject.toml....

Pip's core capability is the actual installation of packages, and uv does a far better job of that part, using smarter caching, hard links to share files, parallelized pre-compilation of .pyc files, etc. Basically it's designed from the ground up with the intention to make lots of environments and expect starting a new one to be cheap. Poetry, as far as I was able to determine, does it basically the same way as pip.

[sgarland]

I actually did use virtualenvwrapper quite a bit until uv. I had built up various shell aliases and functions, so it was fairly painless to create and manage venvs. uv just means that I don’t have to think about that part now.