Up until a few years ago, Python tooling was a nightmare: basic tasks like installing packages or managing Python versions was a pain. The tools were brittle and did not work well together, mired in a swamp of underspecified implementation defined behaviour. Then, apparently suddenly, but in reality backed by years of ongoing work on formal interoperability specifications, we saw a renaissance of new ideas in the Python ecosystem. It started with Poetry and pipx and continued with tooling written in Rust like rye , which later got incorporated into Astral . Astral in particular contributed a very important piece to the puzzle: uv – an extremely fast Python package and project manager that supersedes all previous attempts; For example, it is 10x-100x faster than pip. In this episode I talk to Charlie Marsh, the Founder and CEO of Astral. We talk about Astral’s mission and how Rust plays an important role in it.
