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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know if you've tried to get someone else's Python running recently, but it has devolved into a disaster effectively requiring containers to accurately replicate the exact environment it was written in.

Please show me a project where you believe you "effectively require containers" just to run the code, and I will do my best to refute that.

> since we no longer live in a storage constrained world.

I think you do care about the storage use if you're complaining about containers.

And I definitely care, on principle. It adds up.

For reasons I can only assume have to do with poorly configured CI, pip gets downloaded billions of times annually (https://pypistats.org/packages/pip), and I assume those files get unpacked and copied all the time since there would be no good reason to use uv to install pip. That's dozens of petabytes of disk I/O.

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> Please show me a project where you believe you "effectively require containers" just to run the code

I guess GP meant "containers" broadly, including things like pipx, venv, or uv. Those are, effectively, required since PEP 668:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75608323/how-do-i-solve-...

> "containers" broadly, including things like pipx, venv, or uv.

This statement makes no sense. First off, those are three separate tools, which do entirely different things.

The sort of "container" you seem to have in mind is a virtual environment. The standard library `venv` module provides the base-line support to create them. But there is really hardly anything to them. The required components are literally a symlink to Python, a brief folder hierarchy, and a five-or-so-line config file. Pipx and uv are (among other things) managers for these environments (which manage them for different use cases; pipx is essentially an end-user tool).

Virtual environments are nowhere near a proper "container" in terms of either complexity or overhead. There are people out there effectively simulating a whole new OS installation (and more) just to run some code (granted this is often important for security reasons, since some of the code running might not be fully trusted). A virtual environment is... just a place to install dependencies (and they do after all have to go somewhere), and a scheme for selecting which of the dependencies on local storage should be visible to the current process (and for allowing the process to find them).

> This statement makes no sense. First off, those are three separate tools, which do entirely different things.

They are all various attempts at solving the same fundamental problem, which I broadly referred to as containerization (dependency isolation between applications). I avoided using the term "virtual environment" because I was not referring to venv exclusively.

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