uv with Charlie Marsh

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.