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Comment by ThibWeb | Hacker News Reader

for me the surprise is the pace? I’d expect people to be more set in their tools that it takes longer than a few months for a new tool, no matter how good, to become the majority use one. Though perhaps people adopt new tools more easily in CI where install times matter more

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The pace of uv adoption is insanely fast. It's directly related to how bad the previous Python tools were/are. Even to seasoned veterans set in their ways - they still know a better solution when they see it.

uv having a good pip compatibility layer probably helped a lot, because you could try things out that way and see what fit, so to speak.

It's probably worth mentioning that Astral (The team behind uv/etc) has a team filled with people with a history of making very good CLI tooling. They probably have a very good sense for what matters in this stuff, and are thus avoiding a lot of pain.

Motivation is not enough, there's also a skill factor. And being multiple people working on it "full time"-ish means you can get so much done, especially before the backwards compat issues really start falling into place

uv was really smart in the way they integrated with existing solutions. My whole team just switched over from pip, and it was painless. We were already using pyproject.toml files which made it even easier, but uv also has documentation for transitioning from requirements.txt files.

uv first came out 15th February 2024 so it's a year and a half old now. Still pretty impressive for it to get adoption this fast though.

I feel like I've tried at least 5 different package management tools for python. Between pip, poetry, pip-tools, pipx, I'm not really sure what easy_install, egg, pkg_info are, but I do know I have always been surprised I need to care.

It sounds like uv is a drop-in replacement for pip, pipx, and poetry with all of their benefits and none of the downsides, so I don't see why I wouldn't migrate to it overnight.

It's a (better IMO) replacement for poetry, but not drop-in. Additionally it is a drop-in replacement for venv and pip-tools.

Honestly, I was skeptical when I learned about uv. I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years.

Then I gave it a try and it just worked! It’s so much better that I immediately moved all my Python projects to it.

> I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years.

Pip, venv and virtualenvwrapper (people still use this?) are not meaningfully "dependency managers". A venv is just a place to put things, and pip does only basic tracking and tries to maintain a consistent environment. It isn't trying to help you figure out what dependencies you need, create new environments from scratch, update pyproject.toml....

Pip's core capability is the actual installation of packages, and uv does a far better job of that part, using smarter caching, hard links to share files, parallelized pre-compilation of .pyc files, etc. Basically it's designed from the ground up with the intention to make lots of environments and expect starting a new one to be cheap. Poetry, as far as I was able to determine, does it basically the same way as pip.

I actually did use virtualenvwrapper quite a bit until uv. I had built up various shell aliases and functions, so it was fairly painless to create and manage venvs. uv just means that I don’t have to think about that part now.

I think it’s been long enough now. Uv just has so much velocity. Pyproject.toml and pep support just keeps getting better.

Poetry which I think is the closest analogue, still requires a [tool.poetry.depenencies] section afaik.

You don't even need to edit any files yourself for most simple use cases.

    uv init
    uv add package
    uv run program.py

That's it.

If you inherit a codebase made this way from someone else, merely running uv run program.py will automatically create, launch the venv, configure packages, run your script, seamlessly on first launch.

Uv lets you almost forget virtual environments exist. Almost.

Yep. Poetry was such a delightful upgrade from pipenv, which we’d tested as an upgrade from bare pip, which didn’t have a dependency resolver at the time. If someone’s already fully bought in on poetry, that’d be the one case where I could plausibly imagine them wanting to leave well enough alone.

For everyone else, just try uv and don’t look back.

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