> uv is fast because of what it doesn’t do, not because of what language it’s written in. The standards work of PEP 518, 517, 621, and 658 made fast package management possible. Dropping eggs, pip.conf, and permissive parsing made it achievable. Rust makes it a bit faster still.
So the claim is not well supported at all by the article as you stated, in fact the claim is literally disproven by the article.
> uv is fast because of what it doesn’t do, not because of what language it’s written in.
The fact that the language had a small effect ("a bit") does not invalidate the statement that algorithmic improvements are the reason for the relative speed. In fact, there's no reason to believe that rust without the algorithmic version would be notably faster at all. Sure, "all" is an exaggeration, but the point made still stands in the form that most readers would understand it: algorithmic improvements are the important difference between the systems.
So this:
> The statement that algorithmic improvements are the reason for the relative speed.
Was not at all the statement that I was attacking. For one because I don't disagree with that statement. I even point to this in my very first comment:
> I don't doubt that a lot of uv's benefits are algo. But everything?
You and the other person are trying to pull a classic motte and bailey. Attempting to make it look as if I'm attacking the very reasonable position that algorithms are the bulk of the improvements why UV is fast.
Anyway, dubious claim since a Python interpreter will take 10s of milliseconds just to print out its version.
Do you have any evidence? I can point at techempower benchmarks showing IO bound tasks are still 10-100x faster in native languages vs Python/JS.
That is assuming Rust is 100x faster than Python btw, 49ms of I/O, 1ms of Rust, 100ms of Python.
Okay, so the Rust code would be 3x as fast. Feels arbitrary, but sure.
> You are the one not making sense, we are talking about application performance, why are you not measuring that in milliseconds.
I explained why your post made no sense already...
> That is assuming Rust is 100x faster than Python btw, 49ms of I/O, 1ms of Rust, 100ms of Python.
That's not how anything works. Different languages will perform differently on IO work, different runtimes will degrade under IO differently, etc. That's why even basic echo HTTP servers perform radically differently in Python vs Rust.
This isn't how computers work and it's not even how math works.
This conversation has become nonsensical. The thing we can agree with is this - no, uv would not be as fast if it were written in Python.
> This isn't how computers work and it's not even how math works.
What are you disagreeing with? There's some baseline amount of I/O that the kernel does for you, that's what I'm assuming is 50ms, and everything else like runtime degrading is overhead due to the language/platform choice. I'm saying Rust is upwards of 100x faster in that regard thanks to its zero cost abstraction philosophy. You can't just include the I/O baseline in a claim about Rust's performance advantage. You'll be really disappointed when Rust doesn't download your files 100x as fast as the Python file downloader.
Anyway, I'm sorry I provoked your antagonism with my terse messages, I wasn't trying to be blase. I believe uv is the sort of tool that wouldn't suffer much from the downsides of Python and that in most situations the reduced runtime overhead of Rust would have a negligible impact on the user experience. I'm not arguing that they shouldn't build uv in Rust. Most situations is not all situations, and when a tool is used so widely you'll hit all edge cases, from the point where the 10s of milliseconds of startup time matters to the point where Pythons I/O overhead matters at scale.
IO is executed by kernel, file system or network drivers. IO performance is not dependent at all on which language makes the syscalls.
> The thing we can agree with is this - no, uv would not be as fast if it were written in Python.
In this thread, we are talking about the speed of uv in terms of user experience - how long a person waits for command line operations to complete. Things that pip takes multiple seconds to do, uv will do in dozens of milliseconds. If uv were written in python, it would take dozens of ms + a few dozens more, which means absolutely fuck all nothing in the context of the thousands of milliseconds saved over pip.
Its possible a user might perceive a slight difference in larger projects, but if pip had been uv-but-in-python, the uv-in-rust project would never have been started in the first place because no one would have bothered switching.
> This conversation has become nonsensical.
Agreed. No one in this thread is disputing that Rust code is faster than Python, only that in this case it is completely insignificant in the face of all the useless file and network I/O that pip is doing, and uv is not.
I think your posts on this topic can not possibly be worth responding to if you're coming to the conversation with this level of not understanding things.
Your post is a combination of not understanding computers and then hand waving about fake numbers and user expectations. IO is not magic, it is not some distinct process that you have no control over from userland, it is exactly the sort of thing that Python does very poorly at, in fact.
I'll just reference techempower again, or you can look up those system calls you referenced like how epoll works and then look into what is involved for Python to use epoll effectively.