Comment by naedish
1 day ago
> uv ignores pip’s configuration files entirely. No parsing, no environment variable lookups, no inheritance from system-wide and per-user locations.
Stuff like this sense unlikely to contribute to overall runtime, but it does decrease flexibility.
Astral have been very clear that they have no intention of replicating all of pip. uv pip install was a way to smooth the transition from using pip to using uv. The point of uv wasn't to rewrite pip in rust - and thankfully so. For all of the good that pip did it has shortcomings which only a new package manager turned out capable of solving.
> No bytecode compilation by default. pip compiles .py files to .pyc during installation. uv skips this step, shaving time off every install.
... thus shifting the bytecode compilation burden to first startup after install. You're still paying for the bytecode compilation (and it's serialized, so you're actually spending more time), but you don't associate the time with your package manager.
In most cases this will have no noticeable impact (so a sane default) - but when it does count you simply turn on --compile-bytecode.
I agree that bytecode compilation (and caching to pyc files) seldom has a meaningful impact, but it's nevertheless unfair to tout it as an advantage of uv over pip, because by doing so you've constructed an apples to oranges comparison.
You could argue that uv has a better default behavior than pip, but that's not an engineering advantage: it's just a different choice of default setting. If you turned off eager bytecode compilation in pip you'd get the same result.
> You could argue that uv has a better default behavior than pip, but that's not an engineering advantage: it's just a different choice of default setting. If you turned off eager bytecode compilation in pip you'd get the same result.
Until pip does make the change, this is an engineering advantage for uv. Engineers working on code are part of the product. If I build a car with square wheels and don't change them when I notice the issue, my car still has a bumpy ride, that's a fact.