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by bmitc 500 days ago
> I think the fact that the uv tool itself is not written in Python

It's interesting that the language people choose to write systems with (Python) is basically identified as not the best language to write systems to support that language (Python).

To my knowledge, no other mainstream language has tooling predominantly written in another language.

4 comments

Javascript has quite a lot of tooling written in other (better) languages.

I think Javascript and Python stand out because they are both extremely popular and also not very good languages, especially their tooling. You're obviously going to get a load of people using Javascript and Python saying "why is Webpack/Pip so damn slow? I don't have any choice but to use this language because of the web/AI/my coworkers are idiots, so I may as well improve the tooling".

I believe quite a bit of the JS tooling has been rewritten in other languages over the last decade or so
It's important to use any other language to avoid even the theoretical possibility of bootstrapping complications. All languages that produce self-contained compiled executables are equally suitable for the task.
gcc is written in C++ for like a decade now, so it's not completely unusual.
It's a compiler for C, C++, and adjacent languages though.
Sure, but the point was a tool written in a different language. So the c part of gcc is another example of this issue.