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Comment by kibwen

15 hours ago

> This is interesting in that I wouldn't expect that the typical resolution involves a particularly large quantity of TOML.

I don't know the details of Python's resolution algorithm, but for Cargo (which is where epage is coming from) a lockfile (which is encoded in TOML) can be somewhat large-ish, maybe pushing 100 kilobytes (to the point where I'm curious if epage has benchmarked to see if lockfile parsing is noticeable in the flamegraph).

But once you have a lock file there is no resolution needed, is there? It lists all needed libs and their versions. Given how toml is written, I imagine you can read it incrementally - once a lib section is parsed, you can download it in parallel, even if you didn't parse the whole file yet.

(not sure how uv does it, just guessing what can be done)

  • For whatever it's worth, the toml library uv uses doesn't support streaming parsing: https://github.com/toml-rs/toml/issues/326

    • I'm not sure if it even makes sense for a TOML file to be "read incrementally", because of the weird feature of TOML (inherited from INI conventions) that allow tables to be defined in a piecemeal, out-of-order fashion. Here's an example that the TOML spec calls "valid, but discouraged":

          [fruit.apple]
          [animal]
          [fruit.orange]
      

      So the only way to know that you have all the keys in a given table is to literally read the entire file. This is one of those unfortunate things in TOML that I would honestly ignore if I were writing my own TOML parser, even if it meant I wasn't "compliant".