Gregory's Server2000s: "extend Python with C"
2010s: "extend Python with Python"
2020s: "extend Python with Rust"
I have many conflicting feelings about this progression…
 15 comments
@webology @jacob … you mean RustPython? https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython It’s been around for years; but it’s quite a bit slower than CPython.  @freakboy3742 @jacob No, I'm aware of it and I wish them luck with it. I mean the UV people taking a fresh take on it using whatever magic they are working with. @webology @jacob I don’t think the magic is that magic… the magic is money. If you spend money, you can hire people, and *shit* *gets* *done*. Astral’s proving that with packaging; I’ve spent the last week working full time on getting iOS cross compiles working. That’s time that I don’t have unless someone’s (Anaconda, in my case) is paying me to do it. @webology @freakboy3742 it’s that but it’s not JUST that. Plenty of people get paid to write some pretty terrible software. It’s also taste, and good design, and good execution, and listening to the community, and the benefit of having like a dozen pieces of prior art to learn from, and, and, and …  @jacob @freakboy3742 Second mover, moving in across the board, is that what you're saying? @sgillies @jacob … no? Astral is hardly the *second* mover here - cf pipenv, poetry, pdm, etc etc. But, they’re the first one that has been *funded*, which means it’s not “2 folks fixing bugs on weekends”, it’s “a whole team writing code full time with a purpose”. That makes a *big* difference to the rate of progress. *That* is the point. You can question whether the money poses a strategic risk if/when it goes away; but you can’t argue the money yields *progress*. @freakboy3742 @sgillies ha yeah it’s more like the 12th mover than the 2nd. I mean, it’s not even the first that’s been funded.  @jacob @freakboy3742 @sgillies I _want_ to be supportive of and enthusiastic about this work, I think it's great that people are getting paid properly, but it just has neon warning lights flashing "unsustainable" all over it. and the fact that it is being written *assuming* a full time maintenance team — writing Rust — leads me to an inexorable conclusion that the community will all switch to this great option, which will start bitrotting in 10 months when astral flames out @glyph @jacob @sgillies Oh - absolutely this. As enthusiastic as I am about the direction uv is going, I *haven't* adopted them anywhere - because I want very much to understand Astral’s intended business model before I hook my wagon to their tools. It's definitely not clear to me how they're going to stay liquid once the VC money runs out. They could get me onboard in a hot second if they published a "This is what we're planning to charge for" blog post. @freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies Honestly I try to be really open about this stuff in my writing, on podcasts, in 1:1 conversations, Q&A at events, etc. I really have nothing to hide here, and people ask me about it all the time, I just probably haven't done enough proactive sharing. @freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies I won't really try to convince anyone of anything, I'll just share my most honest answer on how I think about this stuff right now. I don't want to charge people money to use our tools, and I don't want to create an incentive structure whereby our open source offerings are competing with any commercial offerings (which is what you see with a lost of hosted-open-source-SaaS business models). @freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today. @freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies. |
@jacob in the last few months use uv is addressed more things that people realize. pip, pipx, github actions, and now a docker image.
🤔 I wonder when they have their own python fork.