This is a valid concern, but astral just has an amazing track record.
I was surprised to see the community here on HN responding so cautiously. Been developing in python for about a decade now- whenever astral does something I get excited!
I was surprised to see the community here on HN responding so cautiously. Been developing in python for about a decade now- whenever astral does something I get excited!
The issue is, track record is not relevant when the next investors take over.
With uv the worst case is it goes closed source in a few years and we all switch to a fork.
With pip the best case is that maybe in 10 years they have improved it to fix all the issues that uv has already fixed, and you only spend 10 years using shitty software and putting up with endless bugs and paper cuts.
Microsoft – who invented embrace, extend, and extinguish – own NPM, but I don’t see people wringing their hands over them in every thread that mentions NPM. But you mention Astral here or on Reddit and people line up to tell you it’s only a matter of time before they fuck people over. Why the disparity?
Astral on the other hand has basically been rewrites in Rust of existing community-based open source tools, for which there is always the question of how such work is funded. PYX (which is an interesting choice of name given the conflicts with pyrex/cython filenames) from what we can see here appears to be in a similar vein, competing with PyPI and making changes which seemingly require their client (uv) be used.
Anaconda/ContinuumIO was also treated with similar suspicion to Astral, so I don't think it's Astral in particular, it's more they both are operating in the part of the ecosystem where it is comparatively easy to lock out community-based open source tools (which the Python ecosystem appears to have been better at setting up and maintaining than the JS ecosystem).
Astral are not causing issues though. Why does “as long as Astral is not causing issues” not apply?
> Anaconda/ContinuumIO was also treated with similar suspicion to Astral
I haven’t observed this. I have seen condo talked about a fair amount but any issues have always revolved around it being awkward to use. But practically every discussion here or on Reddit about Astral has FUD.
Anaconda/ContinuumIO (the company) was absolutely treated with suspicion, see e.g. https://www.mail-archive.com/numpy-discussion%40scipy.org/ms... (and you'll find many such threads around that time on mailing lists/forums that were where the scientific python community was), and while the sky didn't fall in, their history hasn't been spotless. In many ways Astral is the more "webby" version of Anaconda/ContinuumIO, and so assuming Astral will behave (and evolve) in a similar way to Anaconda/ContinuumIO seems to me at least to be a rational thing to do?
pyx doesn't compete with PyPI; it's a private registry that companies can use e.g. to host internal-only packages, or to provide curated views of things like PyPI for compliance reasons.
> making changes which seemingly require their client (uv) be used
That's an explicit non-goal: "You won't need to use pyx to use uv, and you won't need to use uv to use pyx."