[zahlman]

Yes and no.

Pip is nominally developed by separate people and isn't part of the standard library. However, it does ship with Python by default (Debian-based Linux distributions go out of their way to remove it), in the form of a wheel vendored within the standard library folders. The standard library module `ensurepip` is used to install that wheel - it bootstraps Pip's own code from within that wheel. This is also used indirectly by default when you create a new venv with the standard library `venv`.

(The reason uv can create environments quickly is that it skips that part, while otherwise following nominally the same logic. You can get the same effect by passing `--without-pip` to the `python -m venv` invocation, and it's actually faster (on my machine at least) than using uv. However, you then need to understand how to use pip cross-environment (it wasn't designed for that from the start, but modern pip offers support that's only a little bit buggy). I discuss this on my blog in https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2025/01/07/python-packaging-... .)