12 items tagged “armin-ronacher”
2024
The problem I have with [pipenv shell] is that the act of manipulating the shell environment is crappy and can never be good. What all these "X shell" things do is just an abomination we should not promote IMO.
Tools should be written so that you do not need to reconfigure shells. That we normalized this over the last 10 years was a mistake and we are not forced to continue walking down that path :)
uv under discussion on Mastodon. Jacob Kaplan-Moss kicked off this fascinating conversation about uv on Mastodon recently. It's worth reading the whole thing, which includes input from a whole range of influential Python community members such as Jeff Triplett, Glyph Lefkowitz, Russell Keith-Magee, Seth Michael Larson, Hynek Schlawack, James Bennett and others. (Mastodon is a pretty great place for keeping up with the Python community these days.)
The key theme of the conversation is that, while uv represents a huge set of potential improvements to the Python ecosystem, it comes with additional risks due its attachment to a VC-backed company - and its reliance on Rust rather than Python.
Here are a few comments that stood out to me.
As enthusiastic as I am about the direction uv is going, I haven't adopted them anywhere - because I want very much to understand Astral’s intended business model before I hook my wagon to their tools. It's definitely not clear to me how they're going to stay liquid once the VC money runs out. They could get me onboard in a hot second if they published a "This is what we're planning to charge for" blog post.
As much as I hate VC, [...] FOSS projects flame out all the time too. If Frost loses interest, there’s no PDM anymore. Same for Ofek and Hatch(ling).
I fully expect Astral to flame out and us having to fork/take over—it’s the circle of FOSS. To me uv looks like a genius sting to trick VCs into paying to fix packaging. We’ll be better off either way.
Even in the best case, Rust is more expensive and difficult to maintain, not to mention "non-native" to the average customer here. [...] And the difficulty with VC money here is that it can burn out all the other projects in the ecosystem simultaneously, creating a risk of monoculture, where previously, I think we can say that "monoculture" was the least of Python's packaging concerns.
I don’t think y’all quite grok what uv makes so special due to your seniority. The speed is really cool, but the reason Rust is elemental is that it’s one compiled blob that can be used to bootstrap and maintain a Python development. A blob that will never break because someone upgraded Homebrew, ran pip install or any other creative way people found to fuck up their installations. Python has shown to be a terrible tech to maintain Python.
Just dropping in here to say that corporate capture of the Python ecosystem is the #1 keeps-me-up-at-night subject in my community work, so I watch Astral with interest, even if I'm not yet too worried.
I'm reminded of this note from Armin Ronacher, who created Rye and later donated it to uv maintainers Astral:
However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.
I'm currently inclined to agree with Armin and Hynek: while the risk of corporate capture for a crucial aspect of the Python packaging and onboarding ecosystem is a legitimate concern, the amount of progress that has been made here in a relatively short time combined with the open license and quality of the underlying code keeps me optimistic that uv will be a net positive for Python overall.
Update: uv creator Charlie Marsh joined the conversation:
I don't want to charge people money to use our tools, and I don't want to create an incentive structure whereby our open source offerings are competing with any commercial offerings (which is what you see with a lost of hosted-open-source-SaaS business models).
What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today.
An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies. [...]
But the core of what I want to do is this: build great tools, hopefully people like them, hopefully they grow, hopefully companies adopt them; then sell software to those companies that represents the natural next thing they need when building with Python. Hopefully we can build something better than the alternatives by playing well with our OSS, and hopefully we are the natural choice if they're already using our OSS.
MiniJinja: Learnings from Building a Template Engine in Rust (via) Armin Ronacher's MiniJinja is his re-implemenation of the Python Jinja2 (originally built by Armin) templating language in Rust.
It's nearly three years old now and, in Armin's words, "it's at almost feature parity with Jinja2 and quite enjoyable to use".
The WebAssembly compiled demo in the MiniJinja Playground is fun to try out. It includes the ability to output instructions, so you can see how this:
<ul>
{%- for item in nav %}
<li>{{ item.title }}</a>
{%- endfor %}
</ul>Becomes this:
0 EmitRaw "<ul>"
1 Lookup "nav"
2 PushLoop 1
3 Iterate 11
4 StoreLocal "item"
5 EmitRaw "\n <li>"
6 Lookup "item"
7 GetAttr "title"
8 Emit
9 EmitRaw "</a>"
10 Jump 3
11 PopFrame
12 EmitRaw "\n</ul>"There is an elephant in the room which is that Astral is a VC funded company. What does that mean for the future of these tools? Here is my take on this: for the community having someone pour money into it can create some challenges. For the PSF and the core Python project this is something that should be considered. However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.
uv: Python packaging in Rust (via) "uv is an extremely fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust, and designed as a drop-in replacement for pip and pip-tools workflows."
From Charlie Marsh and Astral, the team behind Ruff, who describe it as a milestone in their pursuit of a "Cargo for Python".
Also in this announcement: Astral are taking over stewardship of Armin Ronacher's Rye packaging tool, another Rust project.
uv is reported to be 8-10x faster than regular pip, increasing to 80-115x faster with a warm global module cache thanks to copy-on-write and hard links on supported filesystems - which saves on disk space too.
It also has a --resolution=lowest option for installing the lowest available version of dependencies - extremely useful for testing, I've been wanting this for my own projects for a while.
Also included: uv venv - a fast tool for creating new virtual environments with no dependency on Python itself.
Rye lets you get from no Python on a computer to a fully functioning Python project in under a minute with linting, formatting and everything in place.
[...] Because it was demonstrably designed to avoid interference with any pre-existing Python configurations, Rye allows for a smooth and gradual integration and the emotional barrier of picking it up even for people who use other tools was shown to be low.
2023
Rye.
Armin Ronacher's take on a Python packaging tool. There are a lot of interesting ideas in this one - it's written in Rust, configured using pyproject.toml and has some very strong opinions, including completely hiding pip from view and insisting you use rye add package instead. Notably, it doesn't use the system Python at all: instead, it downloads a pre-compiled standalone Python from Gregory Szorc's python-build-standalone project - the same approach I used for the Datasette Desktop Electron app.
Armin warns that this is just an exploration, with no guarantees of future maintenance - and even has an issue open titled Should Rye exist?
My strong hunch is that the GIL does not need removing, if a) subinterpreters have their own GILs and b) an efficient way is provided to pass (some) data between subinterpreters lock free and c) we find good patterns to make working with subinterpreters work.
2022
mitsuhiko/insta (via) I asked for recommendations on Twitter for testing libraries in other languages that would give me the same level of delight that I get from pytest. Two people pointed me to insta by Armin Ronacher, a Rust testing framework for “snapshot testing” which automatically records reference values to your repository, so future tests can spot if they change.
2010
Flask 0.1 Released. Armin’s Flask (a Python microframework built around Werkzeug and Jinja2) is looking pretty solid for a two week old project—extensive documentation, comprehensive unit test support (and example applications with unit tests) and some very tidy API design.
2009
What’s New In Python 3.1. Lots of stuff, but the best bits are an ordered dictionary type (congrats, Armin), a Counter class for counting unique items in an iterable (I do this on an almost daily basis) and a bunch of performance improvements including a rewrite of the Python 3.0 IO system in C.
2008
Whitespace Sensitivity. Amusingly, Ruby is actually far more sensitive about whitespace than Python is.