Comment by BiteCode_dev

The golden rule to understand the success of uv is to remind yourself how big and diverse the python community is. Your context is only a tiny fraction of the contexts in which python is going to be executed.

E.G: if you compare it to your machine, it's a different thing that if you compare it to a locked down corporate machines.

I have clients that have Python setup so bad installing all deps for a project takes... 18 minutes. Those are not crazy projects either. It's just the context that is bad. And you won't be able to change the context. But we are in talk to change the package manager to uv.

There are so many different setups that are different than yours. If you are a professional trainer, and you get a new group every week, having 12 people installing their env in a blink is a win. If you are a researcher and you want to download the top 100 pypi packages and attempt to install them, speed is a bliss. If you are a blogger and try a lot of new stuff for an article, it's great. If you are working at repl.io and you get millions of venv created every day, boy does that matter. If you are sysadmin in charge of deploying kub pods, you might be looking at serious savings. Etc.

Speed affects many things:

- CI runs

- AI iterations

- docker builds

- isolated builds over multiple versions of python

But it also unlocks some use cases.

E.G:

- uvx is great only because uv is fast. Because uv calls are virtually instants, using uvx feels like magic.

- "uv run --with" exist only because overlaying a new venv on top of the other is basically free. And it's a killer feature.

- You never create lock files in uv. Because the operation is transparently done in the background since it's so fast. I can't recall the last time I ran uv sync. Because uv run automatically call it, since it's so fast you don't notice. So you just skip the middle man and go straight to coding.

I was a big proponent of "speed is not that important". Until I got speed.

And then I realized I missed a lot, because they are things you just can't do if you are slow.