The comments here betray a significant misunderstanding of both the Python ecosystem and open source work.<p>Getting to a consensus is <i>hard work</i>. They have a vision for how Python packaging and tooling could be better (I assume cargo-like), and a roadmap for improving that. They could have tried to convince the pip maintainers their roadmap was best, but with large fragmented communities like Python it is impossible to reason about how the community will receive changes to tooling. It’s better to build something and get feedback to prove the hypothesis.<p>The choice of Rust is just because they like the developer ergonomics in that language (I suspect a big reason is that they wanted to ship a single binary independent of any Python env). CPython is written in C because… Guido started to write it in C.<p>Many comments here don’t understand that their competitors are actually NOT just pip but the conda ecosystem including micromamba (written in C++) which does not attempt to maintain pip interop at all. Conda realized that there are millions of Python programmers who are not developers and could not debug a GCC error message when pip installing scipy.<p>There are thousands of Python packages that are basically tested on whatever version of Python and libraries the author had installed at the time they wrote it, and literally millions of Github issues that are something like “this doesn’t work because I installed version Y of package X and package Z requires < Y” all vaguely for solveable reasons. Many of these include C/C++ code that builds via custom setup.py scripts.<p>If you haven’t lost days of work to solving stupid dependency issues in Python I’m not sure you can relate.