Python

Forget `pip install`, Use This Instead

Install Python packages up to 100x ⚡ faster than before.

Benedict Neo

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Published in

bitgrit Data Science Publication

4 min readMar 27, 2024

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While scrolling X (give me a follow!), I came across this tweet.

Who is this?

Charlie Marsh is the man behind Astral, a company that is:

They’re building tools that enable developers to ship great software, faster

Ruff

They first released Ruff, a 10–100x speed boost from existing linters like Flake8 and formatters like Black.

I’ve switched to Ruff for all my Python projects, it’s a must-have tool.

Read my article on Ruff here 👇

Supercharge your Python Code with Ruff

An extremely fast linter and code formatter

medium.com

Now back to uv.

What is uv?

uv is a turbo-fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust as a high-speed drop-in substitute for pip, pip-tools, and virtualenv.

It’s 10–100x faster than pip and pip-tools: with a warm cache, uv installs are near-instant.

A few more highlights

Save Disk Space: uses a global cache to prevent duplicated dependencies
Works Everywhere: supports macOS, Linux, and Windows.
Easy to Install: You don’t need Python or Rust installed. You can use using curl, pip, or brew.
Advanced Features: supports dependency version overrides and alternative resolution strategies.
Better Error messages: Best-in-class error messages with a conflict-tracking resolver
Advanced pip: editable installs, git dependicies, local dependencies, source distributions

Why it’s Fast:

Rust: Rust is is known for its speed and safety
“resolver”: a smart way to figure out which versions of packages can work together.
global module cache: it remembers files it has already seen, so it doesn’t redownload or rebuild dependencies
Copy-on-Write and hardlinks: this helps minimize disk space usage.

The bigger vision of uv is to transform Python package management with its speed and reliability.

The next Poetry?

If you’ve been in the Python ecosystem long enough, you know how painful it is to setup a Python environment or to create a package.

uv has plans to establish a “Cargo for Python,” a unified Python package and project manager that is extremely fast, reliable, and easy to use.

Think: a single binary that bootstraps your Python installation and gives you everything you need to be productive with Python, bundling not only pip, pip-tools, and virtualenv, but also pipx, tox, poetry, pyenv, ruff, and more.
Python tooling can be a low-confidence experience: it’s a significant amount of work to stand up a new or existing project, and commands fail in confusing ways. In contrast, when working in the Rust ecosystem, you trust the tools to succeed. The Astral toolchain is about bringing Python from a low-confidence to a high-confidence experience.