alt Hacker NewsWell, now my opinion of uv has been damaged. It...
> Ignoring requires-python upper bounds. When a package says it requires python<4.0, uv ignores the upper bound and only checks the lower. This reduces resolver backtracking dramatically since upper bounds are almost always wrong. Packages declare python<4.0 because they haven’t tested on Python 4, not because they’ll actually break. The constraint is defensive, not predictive
Man, it's easy to be fast when you're wrong. But of course it is fast because Rust not because it just skips the hard parts of dependency constraint solving and hopes people don't notice.
> When multiple package indexes are configured, pip checks all of them. uv picks from the first index that has the package, stopping there. This prevents dependency confusion attacks and avoids extra network requests.
Ambiguity detection is important.
> uv ignores pip’s configuration files entirely. No parsing, no environment variable lookups, no inheritance from system-wide and per-user locations.
Stuff like this sense unlikely to contribute to overall runtime, but it does decrease flexibility.
> No bytecode compilation by default. pip compiles .py files to .pyc during installation. uv skips this step, shaving time off every install.
... thus shifting the bytecode compilation burden to first startup after install. You're still paying for the bytecode compilation (and it's serialized, so you're actually spending more time), but you don't associate the time with your package manager.
I mean, sure, avoiding tons of Python subprocesses helps, but in our bold new free threaded world, we don't have to spawn so many subprocesses.
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> Man, it's easy to be fast when you're wrong. But of course it is fast because Rust not because it just skips the hard parts of dependency constraint solving and hopes people don't notice.
What's underhanded about this? What are the observable effects of this choice that make it wrong? They reformulated the a problem into a different problem that they could solve faster, and then solved that, and got away with it. Sounds like creative problem solving to me.
> uv ignores pip’s configuration files entirely. No parsing, no environment variable lookups, no inheritance from system-wide and per-user locations.
Stuff like this sense unlikely to contribute to overall runtime, but it does decrease flexibility.
Astral have been very clear that they have no intention of replicating all of pip. uv pip install was a way to smooth the transition from using pip to using uv. The point of uv wasn't to rewrite pip in rust - and thankfully so. For all of the good that pip did it has shortcomings which only a new package manager turned out capable of solving.
> No bytecode compilation by default. pip compiles .py files to .pyc during installation. uv skips this step, shaving time off every install.
... thus shifting the bytecode compilation burden to first startup after install. You're still paying for the bytecode compilation (and it's serialized, so you're actually spending more time), but you don't associate the time with your package manager.
In most cases this will have no noticeable impact (so a sane default) - but when it does count you simply turn on --compile-bytecode.
> Man, it's easy to be fast when you're wrong.
There's never going to be a Python 4 so I don't think they are wrong. Even if lighting strikes thrice there's no way they could migrate people to Python 4 before uv could be updated to "fix" that.
> Ambiguity detection is important.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Pip doesn't detect any ambiguities. In fact Pip's behaviour is a gaping security hole that they've refused to fix, and as far as I know the only way to avoid it is to use `uv` (or register all of your internal company package names on PyPI which nobody wants to do).
> thus shifting the bytecode compilation burden to first startup after install
Which is a much better option.
>> Ignoring requires-python upper bounds. When a package says it requires python<4.0, uv ignores the upper bound and only checks the lower. This reduces resolver backtracking dramatically since upper bounds are almost always wrong. Packages declare python<4.0 because they haven’t tested on Python 4, not because they’ll actually break. The constraint is defensive, not predictive > > Man, it's easy to be fast when you're wrong. But of course it is fast because Rust not because it just skips the hard parts of dependency constraint solving and hopes people don't notice.
Version bound checking is NP complete but becomes tractable by dropping the upper bound constraint. Russ Cox researched version selection in 2016 and described the problem in his "Version SAT" blog post (https://research.swtch.com/version-sat). This research is what informed Go's Minimal Version Selection (https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs) for modules.
It appears to me that uv is walking the same path. If most developers don't care about upper bounds and we can avoid expensive algorithms that may never converge, then dropping upper bound support is reasonable. And if uv becomes popular, then it'll be a sign that perhaps Python's ecosystem as a whole will drop package version upper bounds.