Astral OSS Fund: One Year Later One year later: Astral donated $70,000 to open source projects and is pledging another $44,000 for year two.

Exciting to reflect on the the first year of open source funding at Astral — looking forward to another year of growth :)

astral.sh/blog/astral-...

Today, we're announcing our first hosted infrastructure product: pyx, a Python-native package registry.

We think of pyx as an optimized backend for uv: it’s a package registry, but it also solves problems that go beyond the scope of a traditional "package registry".

You can use `uv python install 3.13 --reinstall` and we'll replace the existing one. Virtual environments just contain a reference to the distribution.

Using `uvx uv@<version>` and hyperfine to compare uv versions

uv makes it easy to benchmark uv

These numbers are for CPython 3.13.2.

The benchmark is a simple one — pulled from a report that the conda-forge distribution was more performant than ours. (Now, we're looking ~20% faster than conda-forge on macOS.)

The benchmark is available at gist.github.com/zanieb/551ed...

>20% improvement on x86-64 Linux

And on x86-64 Linux

>40% improvement on aarch64 macOS

In the latest version of uv, we've updated the build system for our managed Python versions to use the latest LLVM version and cherry-picked an extra fix for a performance bug (github.com/llvm/llvm-pr...) and the early benchmarks are pretty exciting!

On M3 macOS

Release 0.5.31 · astral-sh/uv Release Notes Enhancements Add uv sync --script (#11361) Allow PEP 508 requirements in tool requests (#11337) Allow source distributions to produce wheels with +local suffixes (#11429) Bring parit...

For more on the new uv release, see github.com/astral-sh/uv...

What’s new in Python 3.14 Editor, TBD,. This article explains the new features in Python 3.14, compared to 3.13. For full details, see the changelog. Summary – release highlights: PEP 649: deferred evaluation of annotations...

For more on the tail calling interpreter, see docs.python.org/3.14/whatsne... and github.com/python/cpyth...

`python-build-standalone` performance 3.14.0a4 (with default interpreter) vs 3.14.0a5 (with tail call interpreter) `python-build-standalone` performance 3.14.0a4 (with default interpreter) vs 3.14.0a5 (with tail call interpreter) - gist:84748b0ca7bff58cdfb4d0068b446d58

1.23x just is the geometric mean on the pyperformance benchmark suite. There are more significant speedups for some workloads!

Here's a full list, gist.github.com/zanieb/84748...

Python 3.14.0a5 is out today in uv 0.5.31 and includes a new tail calling interpreter which, from some quick benchmarks, looks like a 1.23x performance improvement !

In the latest version, `uvx --with pyyaml python` is supported (which reads a little more clearly and can be repeated to include more dependencies)

Thanks for sharing it! We look at those every once and a while. I wish we could break it down into monthly amounts like the PyPI stats :)

Really excited to be working on CPython and upstreaming python-build-standalone patches!

I see that now 🤦‍♀️ haha

Upstream downstream patches for allowing to make a relocatable (standalone) Python installation · Issue #119696 · python/cpython Feature or enhancement Proposal: I am currently looking at https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone/tree/main/cpython-unix This would be the first step towards python.org possibly provid...

There was some recent discussion about this in github.com/python/cpyth...

I imagine there are other people interested in helping to upstream the changes. Maybe we can find a space to discuss collaboration on Discord?

I'm very interested in this! My next step was to find CPython developers willing to mentor the work — it's great to hear that you're willing to review the changes.

It's a bit of a struggle to find time, but we're investing more resources into this project and upstream support is motivating :)

A new home for python-build-standalone Astral is taking stewardship of python-build-standalone, Gregory Szorc's foundational project for installing portable Python distributions.

Very excited about this transition and improving the distribution of Python! Reach out if you're interested in getting involved :)

astral.sh/blog/python-...

I'm New Here YouTube video by Gil Scott-Heron - Topic

Obligatory deep cut

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQiO...

I have high hopes for a new "Before posting in the issue tracker" issue in uv

github.com/astral-sh/uv...