Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
Hello Fellow Pythonistas!
Is it just me, or does the realm of technology and Python seem to be accelerating at an unprecedented pace? As we dive deeper into 2024, the Python ecosystem continues to evolve with incredible new tools that boost productivity, streamline workflows, and enhance the overall development experience. In this edition, we’ll explore the latest and greatest in Python tooling. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just getting started, there’s something here for everyone. Let’s jump right in!
UV: A Game-Changing Package Installer
uv is a fast Python package installer and resolver written in Rust. Designed as a drop-in replacement for pip and pip-tools workflows, it can also replace virtualenv. This new tool has been met with excitement in the developer community due to its impressive speed and efficiency.
uv handles dependencies by leveraging a global cache to avoid re-downloading or re-building them. Supporting a wide range of advanced pip features, including editable installs, Git dependencies, direct URL dependencies, local dependencies, constraints, and source distributions, uv offers comprehensive functionality. Additionally, uv allows users to specify dependency overrides, a useful feature for teams managing multiple large Python dependencies.
The dramatic speed improvement, with uv being anywhere from 10 to 115 times faster than pip, is attributed to its implementation in Rust. This allows uv to achieve unprecedented installation speeds, especially when operating with a warm cache.
ruff is a Python linter and code formatter, also written in Rust. Designed to be significantly faster than existing tools such as Flake8 and Black, Ruff integrates more functionality into a single interface. It can be used as a pre-commit hook, a VS Code extension, or a GitHub Action.
Ruff is said to be 30 to 120 times faster than other formatters. It consolidates multiple tools, including Flake8, pyLint, Black, isort, pydocstyle, pyupgrade, and autoflake, into a single interface, reducing the time spent formatting and linting code.
In addition to its speed, Ruff offers configuration options not available in Black, such as setting the desired quote style, indent style, line endings, and more. Ruff’s formatter is designed to have drop-in parity with Black, allowing for seamless integration into projects.
PyDantic: Rust-Powered Data Validation
pydantic is a popular data validation library whose core has been rewritten in Rust. This enhancement brings improved performance and reliability, making PyDantic an essential tool for developers handling complex data validation tasks.
Tokenizers by Hugging Face
Hugging Face’s implementation of the most common tokenizers has also embraced Rust, offering significant performance improvements for NLP tasks. These tokenizers are essential for anyone working with large language models and text processing.
Why Rust?
Python developers often argue that runtime speed is not a primary concern in many applications, but there are exceptions. When faced with performance bottlenecks, Rust offers an excellent solution. Rust is a systems programming language that enables developers to write blazing-fast applications. It can detect memory management, parallelization, and other issues during compilation, which the Python interpreter/VM might miss.
Rust’s lack of a runtime makes it a perfect candidate for writing extensions for other languages, such as Python. Tools like PyO3 enable seamless interoperation between Python and Rust, allowing developers to write native Python modules in Rust with ease.
Here’s a quick guide to getting started with PyO3 and maturin:
mkdir hello_python && cd hello_python
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install maturin
maturin init
✔ 🤷 Which kind of bindings to use? · pyo3
Controversies and Impact
While UV and Ruff have received positive feedback for their features and benefits, some users have raised concerns about the learning curve associated with UV’s asynchronous programming model and the limited feature set of some newer tools compared to more established ones. However, the introduction of UV and Ruff has brought new tools and perspectives to the Python community, offering innovative solutions for building high-performance applications and streamlined workflows.
Stay tuned for more updates and insights on the latest Python tools in our upcoming newsletters!
That’s all for now! Happy coding!
No Clocks, LLC
