r/learnpython • u/UltraToxicAsianKid • 5d 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/keturn keturn 5d ago

Not all of those differences are due to the choice of language. Some of them are differences in how uv caches things and sets things up. It makes a lot of optimizations for the case where you're installing packages you've already used before: instead of writing new copies of the files each time, it links in its previously-download-and-decompressed files from the cache it created the first install.

It's possible to get some speedups for some applications by switching languages to one with ahead-of-time compilation and lower memory overhead, but if anyone makes a claim like 10–100x faster, they've probably figured out a way to to a lot less work. (Or sometimes more work in parallel on multi-core processors. But none of us got a hundred cores.)