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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

what is stopping the poetry guys to rewrite poetry from the ground up as part of a breaking new release?

What happened to Poetry? did it just not gain enough traction? I was under the impression it was the hot new thing a few years back then uv comes out of nowhere.

I thought the same thing. Just a few years ago, everyone here was proclaiming Poetry was great, the python ecosystem was finally tamed, pip/conda/setuptools was dead, and every project and developer needs to adopt it.

Now it’s just a has-been. The churn in python is incredible.

It's almost like you're talking about JavaScript. I use Python here and there but wasn't aware of this kind of thrash

The news of this acquisition has made me too scared to admit that I actually have no issues Poetry.

uv is much much faster, but has substantially the same feature set as poetry.

Yeah. There was a wave of "rebuild it in Rust" companies and my complaint with all of them is that they became largely from-spec reimplementations of existing tools with little imagination of their own. The Rust projects are a fraction of the age of the scripted ones and they already feel ossified.

I'm not just talking about Astral here, I'm talking about the JS equivalents too like Biome and VoidZero which basically took the existing ossified architectures and made them gospel -_-

That's not a good interpretation of Astral and uv.

uv is way more than a rewrite in Rust of Poetry or pip - it has a metric ton of smart design decisions that are independent of the language it was written in, both in terms of what it does and how it speeds things up under the hood.

https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html is a useful review of some of the architectural tricks they came up with.

I liked Poetry until I went to contribute a bugfix to the codebase and quickly realized it was already an ossified nightmare.

they have bad taste obviously otherwise we'd all be using their project

Yes, when the poetry people purposely added a feature to fail CI with a 1/10 chance because they wanted to depreciate a feature, I depreciated poetry.

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