Are you looking for fast tools to lint your code and manage your projects? How is the Rust programming language being used to speed up Python tools? This week on the show, we speak with Charlie Marsh about his company, Astral, and their tools, uv and Ruff.

Charlie started working on Ruff as a proof of concept, stating that Python tooling could be much faster. He had seen similar gains in JavaScript tools written in Rust. The project started as a speedy linter with a small ruleset. It’s grown to include code formatting and over 800 built-in linting rules.

Last year, the team at Astral started working on a Python package and project manager written in Rust. As a single tool, uv can replace pip, pip-tools, pipx, poetry, pyenv, and more. We discuss how uv can install and manage versions of Python and run scripts without thinking about virtual environments or dependencies.

Charlie talks about growing the team at Astral over the past couple of years. We also discuss the funding model Astral has adopted and sustaining open-source software.

This episode is sponsored by Postman.

Course Spotlight: Python Basics: Installing Packages With pip

Python’s standard library includes a whole buffet of useful packages, but sometimes you need to reach for a third-party library. That’s where pip comes in handy. In this video course, you’ll learn how to pip install packages.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:03:37 – How did you get involved in open source?
00:07:01 – Fostering a community around a project
00:11:32 – Python tooling could be much, much faster
00:15:45 – Changing the ergonomics of tooling
00:19:59 – What is ruff and what jobs can it do?
00:22:23 – How do you configure ruff?
00:26:02 – Where do the linting rules come from?
00:29:29 – Can you build your own rules?
00:31:28 – Performance difference for ruff
00:36:25 – Installing ruff
00:37:34 – The rustification of Python
00:40:52 – The initial features and release of uv
00:45:07 – Installing Python
00:47:50 – Taking over the python-build-standalone project
00:53:02 – Installation methods and suggestions
00:55:37 – Video Course Spotlight
00:57:07 – The project API
01:01:57 – Inline script metadata and PEP 723
01:06:49 – Installing tools with uvx
01:09:37 – Project management
01:11:20 – Astral as company and VC funding
01:19:23 – New static type checker
01:26:15 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
01:27:12 – What do you want to learn next?
01:28:52 – How can people follow your work online?
01:29:34 – Thanks and goodbye

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