> If something can be rewritten from scratch fairly quickly and ends up being much faster, it makes you wonder what we (the general “we”) might have done “wrong” with the “decades of effort” before.
I think the impact of Rust (and Go) shouldn't be underestimated here. Prior to these languages if you wanted fast runtime you were either using C or C++ with all their associated footguns, tricky build systems, and poor support for exposing and consuming libraries. Or you were using something like Java or C# which meant managing another runtime just for tools, which is especially bad for something like UV which manages runtimes - imagine if you were using a python tool to manage your Java versions and a Java tool to manage you Python versions, it would be a mess!
With both Go and Rust you have fast languages without memory safety issues that compile to a single, easily-installable binary and have a broad ecosystem of libraries available that mean that half the time you don't even need to write any difficult code and can just glue some modules together, and the other half of the time you only need to write the code you actually want to write and not all the support code for general pupose stuff like reading config files, file watching, etc.
I think the impact of Rust (and Go) shouldn't be underestimated here. Prior to these languages if you wanted fast runtime you were either using C or C++ with all their associated footguns, tricky build systems, and poor support for exposing and consuming libraries. Or you were using something like Java or C# which meant managing another runtime just for tools, which is especially bad for something like UV which manages runtimes - imagine if you were using a python tool to manage your Java versions and a Java tool to manage you Python versions, it would be a mess!
With both Go and Rust you have fast languages without memory safety issues that compile to a single, easily-installable binary and have a broad ecosystem of libraries available that mean that half the time you don't even need to write any difficult code and can just glue some modules together, and the other half of the time you only need to write the code you actually want to write and not all the support code for general pupose stuff like reading config files, file watching, etc.