How uv got so fast
uv installs packages faster than pip by an order of magnitude. The usual explanation is “it’s written in Rust.” That’s true, but it doesn’t explain much. Plenty of tools are written in Rust without being notably fast. The interesting question is what design decisions made the difference. Charlie Marsh’s Jane Street talk and a Xebia engineering deep-dive cover the technical details well. The interesting parts are the design decisions: standards that enable fast paths, things uv drops that pip supports, and optimizations that don’t require Rust at all. The standards that made uv possible pip’s slowness isn’t a failure of implementation. For years, Python packaging required executing code to find out what a package needed. The problem was setup.py. You couldn’t know a…
