How uv Achieved Its Performance

Andrew Nesbitt’s “How uv got so fast” explains that uv’s speed comes less from Rust and more from eliminating work entirely.

Speed Through Elimination

Rather than optimizing slow code paths, uv just removes them:

• No .egg support
• No pip.conf
• No bytecode compilation by default
• Ignoring requires-python upper bounds reduces resolver backtracking

Rust-Independent Optimizations

Many of uv’s performance gains could work in pip:

• Parallel downloads instead of sequential
• Smart HTTP range requests for metadata

uv got fast by launching when PEP 658 infrastructure was ready and by skipping backward compatibility requirements that slow down pip.

Read the full article for the complete analysis.