By Paul Krill
Astral, which makes high-performance Python tools such as the Ruff linter, has launched uv, an “extremely fast” Python package installer and resolver written in Rust.
Designed as a drop-in replacement for pip and pip-tools, uv is ready for production use today in projects built around those workflows, Astral wrote in a blog post announcing the product. Developers can install uv via Astral’s stand-alone installers or from Pypl.
Like Ruff, uv was implemented with an obsessive focus on performance, Astral said. The company’s benchmarks show uv to be 8x to 10x faster than pip and pip-tools without caching, and 80x to 115x faster when running with a warm cache.
The package manager was also designed to pose minimal barriers to adoption. uv’s initial release centered on supporting pip and pip-tools APIs behind a uv pip interface, making uv usable by existing projects with no configuration required.
uv ships as a single static binary and supports modern Python packaging features including editable installs, Git dependencies, URL dependencies, local dependencies, constraint files, source distributions, and custom indexes. uv supports Linux, Windows, and macOS.
