Comment by Calavar
2 days ago
Cargo is a hybrid of package manager and build system. So it has frontend fommands wrapping a formatter and loads of other stuff, like code linters, as part of the build system. I've used cargo to build projects even when they have no dependencies and I don't plan to bundle them up and publish them as crates.
I don't know much about go.
uv is also a package manager and a build system.
https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/build-backend/
Thanks for pointing that out. This is news to me. uv has been on my radar for a while and was considering switching to it as a better dependency manager. I didn't realise that it had ambitions beyond being "a better pip." At face value this is a real turn-off. Definitely violates the "do one thing and do it well" principle and puts it squarely in the "does complicated things that I want to avoid" (like poetry) category.
It gets difficult when you compare scripting languages to natively compiled languages, since some of the terminology is overloaded.
"uv build" makes .wheel files, so it is analogous to "cargo publish" (which makes .crate files) as opposed to "cargo build"
I would call this a packaging tool as opposed to a build system.
> "uv build" makes .wheel files, so it is analogous to "cargo publish" (which makes .crate files) as opposed to "cargo build"
This isn't exactly right: `uv build` executes a PEP 517[1] build backend interface, which turns a Python source tree into installable distributions. Those distributions can be sdists or wheels; in this sense, it's closer to `cargo build` than `cargo publish`.
The closer analogy for `cargo publish` would be `uv publish`, which also already exists[2]: that command takes an installable distribution and uploads it to an index.
TL;DR: `uv build` is a proxy for a build system, because that's how distribution construction is standardized in Python. I would not say it's analogous to `cargo publish`, since it's responsible for builds, not publishes.
[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/
[2]: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/package/#publishing-your-pa...
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