> You might `pip install` something and have it fail and then go back to zero and restart and have it work but at some point that will fail.

Can you give a concrete example, starting from a fresh venv, that causes a failure that shouldn't happen?

> but it was written in Python and thus had problems with maintaining its own stable Python enivronment

All it has to do is create an environment for itself upon installation which is compatible with its own code, and be written with the capability of installing into other environments (which basically just requires knowing what version of Python it uses and the appropriate paths - the platform and ABI can be assumed to match the tool, because it's running on the same machine).

This is fundamentally what uv is doing, implicitly, by not needing a Python environment to run.

But it's also what the tool I'm developing, Paper, is going to do explicitly.

What's more, you can simulate it just fine with Pip. Of course, that doesn't solve the issues you had with Pip, but it demonstrates that "maintaining its own stable Python environment" is just not a problem.

>Writing uv in Rust was genius because it eliminates that problem of the system having a stable surface to stand on instead of pipping itself into oblivion, never mind that it is much faster than my system would have been.

From what I can tell, the speed mainly comes from algorithmic issues, caching etc. Pip is just slow above and beyond anything Python forces on it.

An example. On my system, creating a new venv from scratch with Pip included (which loads Pip from within its own vendored wheel, which then runs in order to bootstrap itself into the venv) takes just over 3 seconds. Making a new venv without Pip, then asking a separate copy of Pip to install an already downloaded Pip wheel would be about 1.7 seconds. But making that venv and using the actual internal installation logic of Pip (which has been extracted by Pip developer Pradyun Gedam as https://github.com/pypa/installer ) would take about 0.25 seconds. (There's no command-line API for this; in my test environment I just put the `installer` code side by side with a driver script, which is copied from my development work on Paper.) It presumably could be faster still.

I honestly have no idea what Pip is doing the rest of that time. It only needs to unzip an archive and move some files around and perform trivial edits to others.

> (My system had the extra feature that it used http range requests to extract the metadata from wheel files before pypi started letting you download the metadata directly.)

Pip has had this feature for a long time (and it's still there - I think to support legacy projects without wheels, because I think the JSON API won't be able to provide the data since PyPI doesn't build the source packages). It's why the PyPI server supports range requests in the first place.

> I'd worked on plenty of projects where I was right about the technology and wrong about the politics and I am so happy that uv has saved the Python community from itself.

The community's politics are indeed awful. But Rust (or any other language outside of Python) is not needed to solve the problem.