At RailsWorld earlier this year, I got nerd sniped by someone. They asked “why can’t Bundler be as fast as uv?” Immediately my inner voice said “YA, WHY CAN’T IT BE AS FAST AS UV????”
My inner voice likes to shout at me, especially when someone asks a question so obvious I should have thought of it myself. Since then I’ve been thinking about and investigating this problem, going so far as to give a presentation at XO Ruby Portland about Bundler performance. I firmly believe the answer is “Bundler can be as fast as uv” (where “as fast” has a margin of error lol).
Fortunately, Andrew Nesbitt recently wrote a post called “How uv got so fast”, and I thought I would take this opportunity to review some of the highlights of the post and how techniques applied in uv can (or can’t) be applied to Bundler / RubyGems. I’d also like to discuss some of the existing bottlenecks in Bundler and what we can do to fix them.
If you haven’t read Andrew’s post, I highly recommend giving it a read. I’m going to quote some parts of the post and try to reframe them with RubyGems / Bundler in mind.
Rewrite in Rust?
Andrew opens the post talking about rewriting in Rust:
uv installs packages faster than pip by an order of magnitude. The usual explanation is “it’s written in Rust.” That’s true, but it doesn’t explain much. Plenty of tools are written in Rust without being notably fast. The interesting question is what design decisions made the difference.
This is such a good quote. I’m going to address “rewrite in Rust” a bit later in the post. But suffice to say, I think if we eliminate bottlenecks in Bundler such that the only viable option for performance improvements is to “rewrite in Rust”, then I’ll call it a success. I think rewrites give developers the freedom to “think outside the box”, and try techniques they might not have tried. In the case of uv , I think it gave the developers a good way to say “if we don’t have to worry about backwards compatibility, what could we achieve?”.
I suspect it would be possible to write a uv in Python (PyUv?) that approaches the speeds of uv, and in fact much of the blog post goes on to talk about performance improvements that aren’t related to Rust.
Installing code without eval’ing
... continue reading