How uv actually gets so fast — a look under the hood

Benchmarks that sounded too good to be true

It has been reported that uv benchmarks showed it to be 10–100x faster than pip, and allegedly resolves and installs packages in milliseconds. Skepticism was the obvious first reaction. Speed claims like that make you lean in or roll your eyes. The author of a Noos blog post — picked up on Hacker News — started out skeptical and then dug into the source and the official resolver internals to see whether the numbers held up.

Not just “because Rust”

What the author describes is interesting: the speed gains aren't explained away by “it's written in Rust” alone. The post argues that a combination of design choices — a lean resolver, fewer network round trips, aggressive caching, and careful concurrency — add up to big real-world wins. Read the code and the resolver docs, and the performance becomes less magical and more engineering: focused algorithms and implementation trade-offs that avoid Python-level bottlenecks and unnecessary work.

Why this matters

Fast installs change developer habits. Want to spin up a project? Instant gratification removes friction. The piece is a reminder that language choice is rarely the whole story; architecture and trade-offs matter. So: should the Python packaging world take note, or is this just another niche tool riding a hype wave? The Noos write-up gives you enough of the why to start answering that for yourself — and maybe to rethink what “fast” looks like in package tooling.

Sources: noos.blog, Hacker News