Mmm I don't buy it. Not many projects use setup.py now anyway and pip is still super slow.

> Plenty of tools are written in Rust without being notably fast.

This also hasn't been my experience. Most tools written in Rust are notably fast.

> Not many projects use setup.py now anyway and pip is still super slow.

Yes, but that's still largely not because of being written in Python. The architecture is really just that bad. Any run of pip that touches the network will end up importing more than 500 modules and a lot of that code will simply not be used.

For example, one of the major dependencies is Rich, which includes things like a 3600-entry mapping of string names to emoji; Rich in turn depends on Pygments which normally includes a bunch of rules for syntax highlighting in dozens of programming languages (but this year they've finished trimming those parts of the vendored Pygments).

Another thing is that pip's cache is an HTTP cache. It literally doesn't know how to access its own package download cache without hitting the network, and it does that access through wrappers that rely on cachecontrol and Requests.

Mine either. Choosing Rust by no means guarantees your tool will be fast—you can of course still screw it up with poor algorithms. But I think most people who choose Rust do so in part because they aspire for their tool to be "blazing fast". Memory safety is a big factor of course, but if you didn't care about performance, you might have gotten that via a GCed (and likely also interpreted or JITed or at least non-LLVM-backend) language.