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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

I keep reading praise about uv, and every single time I never really understand what problems it addresses.

I've got a couple quite big Django projects for which I've used venv for years, and not once have I had any significant issues with it. Speed at times could have been better and I would have liked to have a full dependency list lock file, but that never caused me issues.

The only thing that comes to mind is those random fails to build of C/C++ dependencies. Does uv address this? I've always seen people rave about other benefits.

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The benefit that uv adds is it's a one-stop-shop that's also wicked fast.

If you use venv then you have extra steps because you have to explicitly create the venv, then explicitly install the deps there with pip. If your project is designed for a specific python version then developers have to manage that separately (usually pyenv these days).

For people building apps uv replaces venv, pip and pyenv, while being way faster at doing all three of those (you can completely rebuild the virtualenv and install the dependencies from scratch in under a second usually because uv is faster at creating a virtualenv than venv and is very quick at relinking the dependencies from a package cache).

What makes it so great for me is the effortlessness.

I often use Python for quick one off scripts. With UV I can just do `uv init`, `uv add` to add dependencies, and `uv run` whatever script I am working on. I am up and running in under a minute. I also feel confident that the setup isn't going to randomly break in a few weeks.

With most other solutions I have tried in the Python ecosystem, it always seemed significantly more brittle. It felt more like a collection of hacks than anything else.

You can even inline the dependencies:

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

That plus this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42855258

Makes it pretty seamless for one-off scripts.

I'm in the same boat. Sure it's nice and better, but I haven't felt so much annoyance with the python ecosystem that I desperately need something better. I use VS Code and it takes care of venv automatically, so I am biased by that.

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