Since the last Radar, we’ve gained more experience with uv, and feedback from teams has been overwhelmingly positive. uv is a next-generation Python package and project management tool written in Rust, with a key value proposition: it’s "extremely fast." It outperforms other Python package managers by a large margin in benchmarks, accelerating build and test cycles and significantly improving developer experience. Beyond performance, uv offers a unified toolset, effectively replacing tools like Poetry, pyenv and pipx. However, our concerns around package management tools remain: a strong ecosystem, mature community and long-term support are critical. Given that uv is relatively new, moving it to the Adopt ring is bold. That said, many data teams are eager to move away from Python’s legacy package management system, and our frontline developers consistently recommend uv as the best tool available today.
Rust is well suited for writing command-line tools due to its fast startup performance, and we see people rewriting some toolchains in it. We mentioned Ruff, a Python linter written in Rust in the previous Radar. For this volume, we evaluated uv, a Python package management tool written in Rust. The value proposition of uv is "blazing fast" and it beats other Python package management tools by a large margin in their benchmarks. However, during our Radar evaluation, we discussed whether optimizing within seconds for build tools is a marginal improvement. Compared with performance, what’s more important for a package management system is the ecosystem, mature community and long-term support. That being said, feedback from the project team has shown us that this marginal speed improvement could be a big plus for improving feedback cycles and overall developer experience — we tend to manually make CI/CD caching very complex to achieve this little performance improvement; uv simplifies our Python environment management. Considering there is still much room for improvement in package and env management for Python development, we think uv is an option worth assessing.
