Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

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A sure way to learn why it is needed would be to:

1. Write code that crosses a certain complexity treshold. Let's say tou also need compiled wheels for a performance critical section of a library that was written in Rust, have some non-public dependencies on a company-internal got server

2. Try deploying said code on a fleet of servers whose version and exact operating system versions (and python versions!) are totally out of your control. Bonus points for when your users need to install it themselves

3. Wait for the people to contact you

4. Now do monthly updates on their servers while updating dependencies for your python program

If that was never your situation, congrats on your luck, but that just means you really weren't in a situation where the strengths of uv had played out. I had to wrestle with this for years.

This is where uv shines. Install uv, run with uv. Everything else just works, including getting the correct python binary, downloading the correct wheel, downloading dependencies from the non-public git repo (provided the access has been given), ensuring the updates go fine, etc.

This explains a lot for me. On the server side, all my for-pay stuff is deployed using Docker. We have a single Python environment and complete control over it. We do multistage for compilation.

Client side, we don't get the privilege of deploying code: we need to build installers, which means again we have complete control over the environment because we package Python and all associated dependencies.

I'm sure there are marginal benefits to uv even with the above scenarios (better dependency management for example), but it seems that there's a middle ground here which I have largely avoided which is where uv really shines.

Yeah makes sense, with docker in the mix the things uv brings are less interesting, although using uv for small one-off scripts is also an interesting application (there is a way of making uv your shebang, declaring sependencies within the python file and essentially getting a uv-ran python script that will auto-download the needed dependencies).

Over the years I encountered many situations where other solutions (pip+pyenv, poetry, easy_install) lead to hour long stops in dependency hell. Meanwhile uv just works. Even the most complicated projects I transfered over since I decided to make the switch worked first try.

I am not the person who has to go for the newest shiniest thing just because, but if that new shiny thing does the job instead of wasting my time sign me up.

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