alt Hacker NewsOther design decisions that made uv fast:
- uncompressing packages while they are still being downloaded, in memory, so that you only have to write to disk once
- design of its own locking format for speed
But yes, rust is actually making it faster because:
- real threads, no need for multi-processing
- no python VM startup overhead
- the dep resolution algo is exactly the type of workload that is faster in a compiled language
Source, this interview with Charlie Marsh: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/charlie-marsh-on-astral-uv-and-th...
The guy has a lot of interesting things to say.
Replies
> real threads, no need for multi-processing
parallel downloads don't need multi-processing since this is an IO bound usecase. asyncio or GIL-threads (which unblock on IO) would be perfectly fine. native threads will eventually be the default also.
> uncompressing packages while they are still being downloaded
... but the archive directory is at the end of the file?
> no python VM startup overhead
This is about 20 milliseconds on my 11-year-old hardware.