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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

A virtual environment is just a project-specific class path, but for Python.

Which also installs a complete JVM in it.

Not really; it can just symlink the base executable and make a few folders and scripts.

    $ python -m venv --without-pip test-venv && du -sh test-venv
    56K     test-venv

Conceptually, a venv has its own executable.

Physically, that can just be a symlink to the system python (or another version that is still potentially shared with multiple venvs.)

That's one of the great things about uv: it uses clever symlink tricks to avoid installing copies of things, so it's wildly fast.