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Before uv came along, pipenv, Poetry, and (much older) Conda all were trying to solve this problem. It's a huge problem for Python that not all languages experi

Before uv came along, pipenv, Poetry, and (much older) Conda all were trying to solve this problem. It's a huge problem for Python that not all languages experience, because Python packages can contain all sorts. At one point if you wanted to install Scipy you had to drag in (and compile, if I remember correctly!) Fortran, of all things[0]. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/14822245/61938 https://stackoverflow.com/a/14822245/61938

PaulHoule 16d ago
Well Java has a kind of xenophobia that really resists bringing in foreign code but Python is at it's best when it accesses wrappers around C and Fortran. I used conda back in that period, it had a correct solver, and it was easy to manage my own packages, but it was slow in the technical sense of "it takes forever to build an environment" and slow in the business sense in that you got something curated which was not always the greatest or the latest but would, back in the day, "just work." Actually you could vendorize any software you need and have your own conda wheels, like I made wheels with different versions of CUDA drivers which are just DLLs so you could be running models with two versions of tensorflow that required two different versions of CUDA and never have to touch the NVIDIA installer. But today it is a more "just works" experience to use PyPi instead of conda so I don't use conda. Poetry was a big improvement over pip but I don't believe the resolver was 100% correct (like from looking at the source code) and performance was not that good, not so much because it was written in Python but because it did not have a proper cache, did not exploit concurrency. The Python way would be to use a world class SMT solver for the CPU intensive bit but when the bits hit the bus Rust is better at exploiting concurrency. So I am happy to have uv.

PaulHoule 16d ago

Well Java has a kind of xenophobia that really resists bringing in foreign code but Python is at it's best when it accesses wrappers around C and Fortran. I used conda back in that period, it had a correct solver, and it was easy to manage my own packages, but it was slow in the technical sense of "it takes forever to build an environment" and slow in the business sense in that you got something curated which was not always the greatest or the latest but would, back in the day, "just work." Actually you could vendorize any software you need and have your own conda wheels, like I made wheels with different versions of CUDA drivers which are just DLLs so you could be running models with two versions of tensorflow that required two different versions of CUDA and never have to touch the NVIDIA installer. But today it is a more "just works" experience to use PyPi instead of conda so I don't use conda. Poetry was a big improvement over pip but I don't believe the resolver was 100% correct (like from looking at the source code) and performance was not that good, not so much because it was written in Python but because it did not have a proper cache, did not exploit concurrency. The Python way would be to use a world class SMT solver for the CPU intensive bit but when the bits hit the bus Rust is better at exploiting concurrency. So I am happy to have uv.