Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty
85 points by jt-hill 5 days ago | 24 comments
  • curiousgal 5 days ago |
    Not to gatekeep things but if you think uv solved python dependency issues then you probably never had those issues in the first place and pip would have been enough for your use case. Conda on the other hand, with external binary dependencies, now we're talking.
    • simonw 5 days ago |
      The key issue uv solved wasn't dependencies, it was environments.

      I used to have hundreds of venv folders scattered around my machine. These days I use "uv run" or "uvx" or "uv run --with boto3 python" and uv handles all of the bookkeeping for me.

      • bmitc 5 days ago |
        Poetry had already solved that.
        • saaspirant 5 days ago |
          It was very slow compared to uv
          • bmitc 5 days ago |
            Yes, but it still solves dependencies and environments.
            • pixl97 4 days ago |
              "Solves one problem by introducing another, possibly worse problem"

              And you wonder why people didn't adopt it.

        • simonw 5 days ago |
          What's the poetry equivalent of this?

            uv run --with boto3 python
          • bmitc 5 days ago |
            The claim was:

            > The key issue uv solved wasn't dependencies, it was environments.

            and not specific, niche features.

            I don't know of such a command in Poetry, but it could still be solved with dev groups or running Python in the virtual environment and installing the package.

            • simonw 5 days ago |
              That command is an environment command. It runs Python in a temporary environment with boto3 installed - I use that trick all the time.
    • necubi 5 days ago |
      I’m someone who is not a python developer but has to use python tools and run other people’s python code. I have suffered through learning about anaconda, virtualenv, pip, and more. Uv is the first time there’s a tool that just runs the software without requiring me to become a python ecosystem expert
    • freehorse 4 days ago |
      Well it is much faster so you can keep iterating installing dependencies until you fix the issue in much less time
    • roflcopter69 2 days ago |
      +1 for Conda. I also have to mention pixi (https://github.com/prefix-dev/pixi) which kinda is a uv for the Conda ecosystem. Highly recommend!
  • ChrisArchitect 5 days ago |
  • vivzkestrel 5 days ago |
    what is stopping the poetry guys to rewrite poetry from the ground up as part of a breaking new release?
    • fud101 4 days ago |
      they have bad taste obviously otherwise we'd all be using their project
      • androiddrew 4 days ago |
        Yes, when the poetry people purposely added a feature to fail CI with a 1/10 chance because they wanted to depreciate a feature, I depreciated poetry.
    • redrove 4 days ago |
      What happened to Poetry? did it just not gain enough traction? I was under the impression it was the hot new thing a few years back then uv comes out of nowhere.
      • sseagull 4 days ago |
        I thought the same thing. Just a few years ago, everyone here was proclaiming Poetry was great, the python ecosystem was finally tamed, pip/conda/setuptools was dead, and every project and developer needs to adopt it.

        Now it’s just a has-been. The churn in python is incredible.

        • steve_adams_86 3 days ago |
          It's almost like you're talking about JavaScript. I use Python here and there but wasn't aware of this kind of thrash
      • ardeaver 4 days ago |
        The news of this acquisition has made me too scared to admit that I actually have no issues Poetry.
      • ForHackernews 4 days ago |
        uv is much much faster, but has substantially the same feature set as poetry.
        • conartist6 3 days ago |
          Yeah. There was a wave of "rebuild it in Rust" companies and my complaint with all of them is that they became largely from-spec reimplementations of existing tools with little imagination of their own. The Rust projects are a fraction of the age of the scripted ones and they already feel ossified.

          I'm not just talking about Astral here, I'm talking about the JS equivalents too like Biome and VoidZero which basically took the existing ossified architectures and made them gospel -_-

          • simonw 3 days ago |
            That's not a good interpretation of Astral and uv.

            uv is way more than a rewrite in Rust of Poetry or pip - it has a metric ton of smart design decisions that are independent of the language it was written in, both in terms of what it does and how it speeds things up under the hood.

            https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html is a useful review of some of the architectural tricks they came up with.

    • skrtskrt 4 days ago |
      I liked Poetry until I went to contribute a bugfix to the codebase and quickly realized it was already an ossified nightmare.