Having used it for work, I really don’t understand the appeal, especially when compared to tools like Poetry. Uv persists in the dependency on requirements.txt, doesn’t streamline the publishing process, and contrary to the claims, it’s not a drop-in replacement for pip, as the command line API is different.
It’s really fast, which is nice if you’re working on a nightmare codebase with 3000 dependencies, but most of us aren’t, and Poetry is pretty damned fast.
If uv offered some of what Poetry does for me, if at the very least we could finally do away with requirements.txt and adopt something more useable – baked into pyproject.toml of course – then I’d be sold. But this is just faster pip.
Having used it for work, I really don’t understand the appeal, especially when compared to tools like Poetry. Uv persists in the dependency on requirements.txt, doesn’t streamline the publishing process, and contrary to the claims, it’s not a drop-in replacement for pip, as the command line API is different.
It’s really fast, which is nice if you’re working on a nightmare codebase with 3000 dependencies, but most of us aren’t, and Poetry is pretty damned fast.
If uv offered some of what Poetry does for me, if at the very least we could finally do away with requirements.txt and adopt something more useable – baked into pyproject.toml of course – then I’d be sold. But this is just faster pip.
Early on uv was only trying to replace pip. This latest update is a big step towards becoming a poetry (and pyenv/pipx) replacement too.
uv 0.3 introduces a cross platform lock file: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/#lockfile
More precise details on the compatibility of
uv pipwithpipare documented here: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/pip/compatibility/Uv is currently only a pip replacement as a dependency resolver (and downloader), it was actually adopted by astral from a different dev afaik
Their vision is to evolve it into a “Cargo for Python”, so it’s coming.