Well, well, well. Here we are in 2025 and Python packaging has finally been fixed. Not by the Python community, mind you - they had their shot for about 20 years. No, it took the Rust folks to come in and show us how it’s done.
The Long, Painful History
Let me paint you a picture. Back when I was starting out, we had distutils.
That was it. Then came setuptools, which was supposed to fix everything.
Then pip showed up to handle installation. Then virtualenv because global
package installs were a nightmare. Then pipenv to combine pip and
virtualenv. Then poetry because pipenv wasn’t quite right. Then pip-tools
for deterministic builds. Then conda for scientific computing. Then…
You get the idea. Each tool solved one specific problem while creating three
new ones. The Python community spent decades bikeshedding over package
formats, dependency resolution algorithms, and lock file formats while the
rest of the world just wanted to install packages without breaking their
system. Some tools even managed to break the ancient Unix standard of
shebang lines - you know, that #!/usr/bin/env python thing that’s been
working since the dawn of time.
The Delusion
Here’s the thing that drives me nuts: the Python community kept insisting they could solve this from within. “We just need better standards!” they’d cry. “PEP 517 will fix everything!” Narrator: it didn’t. “PEP 621 is the answer!” Still waiting on that revolution.
Meanwhile, every other modern language figured this out ages ago. Cargo for Rust. Go modules. npm (despite its flaws) for JavaScript. Even Perl got CPAN right decades ago! But Python? Python kept spawning new tools that partially solved the problem while maintaining backward compatibility with decades of technical debt.
Enter uv: Rust to the Rescue
Then along comes Astral with
uv, written in
Rust, and suddenly everything just… works.
It’s fast. Like, stupidly fast. It handles virtual environments
transparently. It resolves dependencies without making you wait for your
coffee to brew. It installs packages so quickly you wonder if it actually did
anything.
The best part? They didn’t try to be compatible with every broken decision the Python packaging ecosystem made over the past two decades. They looked at what actually needed to be solved and built a tool that solves those problems.
The Irony
The delicious irony here is that it took a systems programming language to fix a scripting language’s package management. Rust’s obsession with memory safety and performance optimization turns out to be exactly what Python’s packaging ecosystem needed. Who could have predicted that?
It’s like watching someone struggle to open a jar for 20 years, refusing help from anyone, only to have their neighbor walk over with the right tool and pop it open in two seconds.
What This Means
For those of us who’ve been dealing with Python packaging hell since the
easy_install days, uv feels like a miracle. One tool that does
everything, does it fast, and doesn’t break when you look at it sideways.
Release engineers everywhere can finally sleep soundly knowing their builds
won’t randomly break because of dependency resolution conflicts or virtual
environment corruption.
The Python community should probably feel a little embarrassed about this. Twenty years of “we can fix this ourselves” only to be shown up by a tool written in a different language entirely. But hey, at least we finally have something that works.
So here’s to the Rust community for doing what the Python community couldn’t: fixing Python packaging. Sometimes you need an outsider’s perspective to see the forest for the trees. Or in this case, to see the solution through all the PEPs.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go update all my projects to use uv. It
only takes about 30 seconds per project, which is another miracle in itself.
The best part? My colleagues independently discovered uv around the same
time I did - that’s how you know a tool is genuinely solving real problems
when multiple people stumble across it organically.
My post on linked-in
My post on linked-in has gotten the most views of anything I posted in the last year on the platform. It has led to several new friend requests and interesting conversations.
10 days later the post has 146 likes. 😮 Thank you all. I’m honored.