26th December 2025
Research
HTTP Range Requests for Wheel Metadata
— Leveraging ZIP file structure and HTTP range requests, tools like uv efficiently extract wheel metadata for Python packages without downloading entire archives. By fetching just the last 16KB of the wheel (central directory and EOCD), parsing for the METADATA file offset, and then requesting exactly its byte range, uv and the accompanying Python prototype routinely reduce bandwidth usage by over 70%.
Recent articles
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026
- Something is afoot in the land of Qwen - 4th March 2026