I feel the same way about Ruff, for example. One day it was "black all the things" and the next it's "btw we just reimplemented the entire Python formatting/linting ecosystem in Rust, and it's 100x faster, no biggie".
What's happening? Is it just so much easier to write stuff in Rust that projects like these pop out of people's heads, fully-formed? It boggles the mind.
(3) is important because if it was written in Javascript or Java or Python or .NET or many other languages I'd have to learn something about the runtimes of those environment to get it working. If it was written in Python it would have to deal with the bootstrapping problem that it ought to have it's own Python installation separate from the one that it is manipulating so it can't have conflicts with that environment. (e.g. how many times have I busted my poetry?) I can use "uv" or "ruff" without learning anything about Rust!
As for (2) the speed of "uv" has as much to do with better algorithms and caching as it does with being in Rust and thus much faster than Python. I think you could have done better than Poetry in Python but "uv" is transformative in that it can often build an environment in seconds or less whereas with "poetry" or "pip" or "conda" I might have time to pound out a few posts on HN. I used to avoid creating new Python environments as much as possible but now it is fast, easy, and even fun.
I bet it is more work to write "uv" in rust as opposed to a similar tool in Python but the impact on the community is so huge because we can finally put problem (1) behind us and do it with speed, reliability and grace. I had notes on how to build a better python package management system and sometimes thought about trying it but I'd become convinced that the social problem of too many people finding half-baked tools like "pip" and "poetry" acceptable was intractable. Thanks to "uv" nobody will ever have to write one.
Yes, RustPython has been in development since at least 2018.
> Wouldn't this be making waves much earlier in its development process?
It's been posted on HN several times before: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=rustpython
That said, my experience has been that adding business features in Rust apps is quite fast indeed!
Still, the maintainers stated that they don’t plan to implement Python’s readline module because they already have a rust implementation of readline. A similar argument could apply here - use native rust implementations of dependencies and expose them via the expected Python APIs. This would break some ambitious Python programs, but those probably wouldn’t consider alternative runtimes anyway.
If not, is it at all possible to get numpy to work and other libraries written in native code? I see that rustpython also work in wasm: but what about compiling numpy's native code to wasm as well?
Every time I want to rewrite a shell function in python, I always hesitate due to the slow startup.
$ time A=1 B=1 python -c "import os; print(int(os.getenv('A'))+int(os.getenv('B')))"
2
real 0m0.068s
user 0m0.029s
sys 0m0.026sSo I guess it really just depends what your scripts use.
Running it on hardened Linux, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD was a start. A Rust implementation might help.
I also miss setups like eCos RTOS where a GUI determined which features got compiled in. Strip each Python app down to just what it needs in the interpreter. Might squeeze it in L1-L2 cache that way, too. Aside from embedded (eg MicroPython), has anyone anything like that for use on servers?
[1] https://rustpython.github.io/pages/whats-left
[2] https://rustpython.github.io/pages/regression-tests-results....
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