2000s: "extend Python with C"2010s: "extend Python with Python"2020s: "extend Python with Rust"
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@webology @freakboy3742 it’s that but it’s not JUST that. Plenty of people get paid to write some pretty terrible software. It’s also taste, and good design, and good execution, and listening to the community, and the benefit of having like a dozen pieces of prior art to learn from, and, and, and …
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@jacob @freakboy3742 Second mover, moving in across the board, is that what you're saying?
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Russell Keith-Mageereplied to Sean Gillies last edited by
@sgillies @jacob … no? Astral is hardly the *second* mover here - cf pipenv, poetry, pdm, etc etc. But, they’re the first one that has been *funded*, which means it’s not “2 folks fixing bugs on weekends”, it’s “a whole team writing code full time with a purpose”. That makes a *big* difference to the rate of progress. *That* is the point.
You can question whether the money poses a strategic risk if/when it goes away; but you can’t argue the money yields *progress*.
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jacobianreplied to Russell Keith-Magee last edited by
@freakboy3742 @sgillies ha yeah it’s more like the 12th mover than the 2nd. I mean, it’s not even the first that’s been funded.
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@jacob @freakboy3742 @sgillies I _want_ to be supportive of and enthusiastic about this work, I think it's great that people are getting paid properly, but it just has neon warning lights flashing "unsustainable" all over it. and the fact that it is being written *assuming* a full time maintenance team — writing Rust — leads me to an inexorable conclusion that the community will all switch to this great option, which will start bitrotting in 10 months when astral flames out
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@glyph @jacob @sgillies Oh - absolutely this. As enthusiastic as I am about the direction uv is going, I *haven't* adopted them anywhere - because I want very much to understand Astral’s intended business model before I hook my wagon to their tools. It's definitely not clear to me how they're going to stay liquid once the VC money runs out. They could get me onboard in a hot second if they published a "This is what we're planning to charge for" blog post.
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Seth Michael Larsonreplied to Russell Keith-Magee last edited by
@freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies I haven't adopted uv anywhere for similar reasons. 100% agreed on money being the magic, it turns out you can do a whole lot with 8 hours a day.
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@sethmlarson @freakboy3742 @jacob @sgillies kind of a relief to hear that this is a common sentiment, and maybe I will also remain stalwartly anti-uv until a similar milestone
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@glyph @sethmlarson @freakboy3742 @jacob @sgillies As much as I hate VC, I find this whole genre of pearl-clutching around uv weird. FOSS projects flame out all the time too. If Frost loses interest, there’s no PDM anymore. Same for Ofek and Hatch(ling).
I fully expect Astral to flame out and us having to fork/take over—it’s the circle of FOSS. To me uv looks like a genius sting to trick VCs into paying to fix packaging. We’ll be better off either way.
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@hynek @glyph @sethmlarson @freakboy3742 @jacob @sgillies SAME! Took me five minutes to move to uv in most projects. Will take me 5 minutes to move to vu, pipper, or whatever might be necessary to move to. I don’t think the VC aspect is at all inherently evil but agree the concern of “going all in” which honestly is changing a half dozen lines of your CI/Dockerfile is some big deal.
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@frank @hynek @glyph @sethmlarson @freakboy3742 @jacob @sgillies the switching cost I worry most about here is documentation and tutorials - if the Python community goes all-in on uv, and uv then fails, that's a metric TON of tutorials, READMEs, YouTube intros etc that would cease to be relevant
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Simon Willisonreplied to Hynek Schlawack last edited by
@hynek @glyph @sethmlarson @freakboy3742 @jacob @sgillies Armin wrote about that here in the footnote: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/8/21/harvest-season/
> However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.
He's Rust-fluent though!
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Charlie Marshreplied to Russell Keith-Magee last edited by
@freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies Honestly I try to be really open about this stuff in my writing, on podcasts, in 1:1 conversations, Q&A at events, etc. I really have nothing to hide here, and people ask me about it all the time, I just probably haven't done enough proactive sharing.
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@freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies I won't really try to convince anyone of anything, I'll just share my most honest answer on how I think about this stuff right now. I don't want to charge people money to use our tools, and I don't want to create an incentive structure whereby our open source offerings are competing with any commercial offerings (which is what you see with a lost of hosted-open-source-SaaS business models).
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@freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today.
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@freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies.