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Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.
Just a tiny project with over 100 million downloads every month, over 4 million every day. No big deal. Just a small shop, don't overstate its importance.

https://pypistats.org/packages/uv

Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.
Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good tools, they will forever entangle themselves and you. It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me deploy it without having to manually detangle all that garbage by version.

I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind of thing, there's wrong people in the right job, and they only know python. If no one self-writes code anymore anyway, at least use a language that isn't a clusterfuck of bad design decisions, and has 1 trillion lines of code in the collective memory of people who don't know what a stack is.

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Maybe you could. I would stare longingly into the void, wondering if I can ever work another python project after having experienced uv, ruff, and ty.

Such an outcome would make me wonder regarding the wisdom of "It is better to have love and lost than to have never loved at all."

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Personally I would stop using Python again. uv is the one thing that made it bearable.
I see Apache and MIT license files in their GitHub. What's to prevent the community from forking and continuing development if the licenses change?
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While I hope it never comes to that, all the code is MIT licensed, I would assume everyone would make the sensible decision for fork it.
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I wish that were also true for the case of Claude/Codex/etc
I would just ditch Python, like I did 8 years ago.
Eurgh, I do not want to ever touch Poetry or pyenv again, thank you very much.
I mean, if you believe the hype on this website, Claude Code could build a perfect clone of uv in a few hours using only the documentation.
That says more about the sad state of modern CI pipelines than anything about uv's popularity.

Not disputing that it's a great and widely used tool, BTW.

The “requests” package gets downloaded one billion times every month, should that be a multi billion dollar VC company as well? It’s a package manager and other neat tooling, it’s great but it’s hardly the essence of what makes Python awesome, it’s one of the many things that makes this ecosystem flourish. If OpenAI would enshittify it people would just fork or move on, that’s all I’m saying, it’s not in any way a single point of failure for the Python ecosystem.
> the essence of what makes Python awesome

This is not the point of uv or any good package manager. The point is what prevents Python to suck. For a long time package management had been horrible in Python compared what you could see in other languages.

I do feel like it is overstated, and the number of downloads is not a good metric at all. There are npm packages with many millions of downloads, too.
You can take my padleft function from my cold dead hands, but it will live forever in example code!
I mean, these sorts of numbers speak to the mind-bogglingly inefficient CI workflows we as an industry have built. I’d be surprised if there were 4 million people in the world who actually know what ‘uv’ is.
It's not difficult to download something yourself 4 million times every day to look popular :)
They have some nice ideas. But if they turn to shit you can just fork their tools and use that instead.
Agreed.

Maybe there needs to be some nonprofit watchdog which helps identify those cases in their early stages and helps bootstrap open forks. I'd fund to a sort of open capture protection savings account if I believed it would help ensure continuity of support from the things I rely on.

VC money bailing out other VCs. A tale as old as time.
Do you have any statistics for that?
uv has almost 2x the number of monthly downloads Poetry has.

- https://pypistats.org/packages/poetry - https://pypistats.org/packages/uv

In the 2024 Python developer survey, 18% of the ecosystem used Poetry. When I opened this manifold question[0], I'm pretty sure uv was about half of Poetry downloads.

Estimating from these numbers, probably about 30% of the ecosystem is using `uv` now. We'll get better numbers when the 2025 Python developer survey is published.

Also see this: https://biggo.com/news/202510140723_uv-overtakes-pip-in-ci-u...

[0]: https://manifold.markets/JeremiahEngland/will-uv-surpass-poe...

anecdotally every place ive worked at has switched over and never looked back.
Same. It's game-changing - leaps and bounds above every previous attempt to make Python's packaging, dependency management, and dev workflow easy. I don't know anyone who has tried uv and not immediately thrown every other tool out the window.
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been in the python game a long time and i've seen so many tools in this space come and go over the years. i still rely on good ol pip and have had no issues. that said, we utilize mypy and ruff, and have moved to pyproject etc to remotely keep up with the times.
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