HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Charlie Marsh: uv: An Extremely Fast Python Package Manager Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Charlie Marsh: uv: An Extremely Fast Python Package Manager

Jane Street
Talks
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2024–2025 score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as a fascinating technical account of the optimizations behind uv's speed.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

“I recently watched a talk by the author of uv that was surprisingly fascinating” (HN, 2024)

1 strong recommendations · 2 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks · intermediate · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@kolja005 Nov 2024 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Using uv with PyTorch
I recently watched a talk by the author of uv that was surprisingly fascinating [1]. He goes into a few of the more notable hacks that they had to come up with to make it as fast as it is. The most interesting thing for me was that package resolution in python given constraints defined (eg. in requirements.txt) maps to a boolean satisfiability problem which is NP-complete. So uv uses a custom SAT solver to do this. I totally under-appreciated how much goes into this software and I'm bummed I have to use Poetry at work after having watched this talk. [1] [this video] edit: NP-complete not NP-hard
Hacks behind uv's speed, including dependency resolution as SAT
@krick Dec 2025 Recommends
on HN thread How uv got so fast
Read more
To be fair, the whole post isn't very good IMO, regardless of ChatGPT involvement, and it's weird how some people seem to treat it like some kind of revelation. I mean, of course it wasn't specifically Rust that made it fast, it's really a banal statement: you need only very moderate serious programming experience to know, that rewriting legacy system from scratch can make it faster even if you rewrite it in a "slower" language. There have been C++ systems that became faster when rewritten in Python, for god's sake. That's what makes system a "legacy" system: it does a ton of things and nobody really knows what it does anymore. But when listing things that made uv faster it really mentions some silly things, among others. Like, it doesn't parse pip.conf. Right, sure, the secret of uv's speed lies in not-parsing other package manager's config files. Great. So all in all, yes, no doubt that hundreds of little things contributed into making uv faster, but listing a few dozens of them (surely a non-exhaustive lists) doesn't really enable you to make any conclusions about the relative importance of different improvements whatsoever. I suppose the mentioned talk[0] (even though it's more than a year old now) would serve as a better technical report. [0] [this video]
Better technical report on uv speed than the blog post

Citations, criticism and jokes

@snthpy Dec 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Rust regex engine internals as a library
So much love for @burntsushi He's improved my life in so many ways, rg, ... and now also in Python with uv! Glad to see Charlie giving him the credit for figuring out the version comparison optimization in uv in [1]. Also huge thank you to the whole Astral team for all they're doing on uv It's magic! 1: [this video]
Charlie credits burntsushi for version comparison optimization

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close