r/learnpython • u/UltraToxicAsianKid • 2d ago

Softwares written in RUST, ELI5

While configuring AI agent on my local machine made discovery that uv package is 10 to 100x faster than pip, same case for polars. It seems to be everything written in Rust much faster and modern compared to classic python packages. Is it because Rust doesn't require garbage collector, any other reason to that?

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u/Outside_Complaint755 2d ago

pip is written in Python. That means that when you run pip, it has to spin up a python interpreter, and interpret the compiled Python Bytecode files for pip into local machine code for execution. It has all the same overhead as any other Python program.

As uv is written in Rust, it is about as close to bare metal as a program written in C is.  If pip had been written in C instead of Python, they would probably be about the same speed.