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How uv got so fast | Andrew Nesbitt

nesbitt.io · 1,339 words · saved by 1 readers

uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago.

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 s

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