Insights from my Software Engineering Radio interview with Wolf Wollprecht
Introduction
As a co-host of the Software Engineering Radio podcast, I interviewed Wolf Vollprecht, the founder and CEO of Prefix, to discuss the creation of Pixi, a Rust-based workflow manager for Python. During our conversation, Wolf shared some fascinating insights into both his development process and the unique features of Pixi. I’m thankful that Wolf took the time to participate in this thought-provoking discussion about Rust-based tooling for Python!
Insights
Here are three takeaways from my interview with Wolf Vollprecht:
Why did Wolf choose the Rust programming language to build Pixi?
“It was not initially a completely obvious decision because I already had a lot of experience with C++ and Mamba and we could have stuck to the C++ ecosystem, but in hindsight I’m very happy that we chose Rust. It comes with this rich ecosystem; it helped us to use the same sort of underlying code in our website as well and our platform and we want to capitalize on that in the future much more by building awesome services.”
How does Pixi ensure reproducibility in Python projects?
“Reproducibility in the scientific world is also a big problem. And with Pixi we want to make sure that the scientist that uses Pixi can get the same results now and then also get the same results in 10 years if you run the same data pipelines and things like this. And we make sure of that by creating a very tight lock file that locks down packages down to the SHA hash.”
How does Pixi handle the challenge of cross-platform compatibility?
“So the majority of work was already done because, well we are piggybacking on the Conda ecosystem and Conda Forge specifically as a really large repository of existing packages. And so a lot of the nice tools that we want to use, or our users might want to use are already available. But then there are some more intricate challenges because Windows and Unix are usually quite different.”
Listen
In conclusion, if you’re interested in learning more about the challenges and benefits of implementing Python tooling in Rust, I highly recommend that you listen to Wolf Vollprecht on Python Tooling in Rust from Software Engineering Radio! You can find it on your favorite podcast player, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or listen to it with this handy podcast player.