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.
