2023-04-20 16:20:03
I built Ruff to test a theory: that Python tooling could be much, much faster. This theory was validated in the initial prototype. But even so, I wasn’t sure anyone would care about a faster linter.
The past few months have proven that the Python community cares – a lot! Since August, Ruff has exceeded one million monthly downloads and 12,000 stars. It has been adopted by some of the most popular and established Python projects on Earth, like Airflow, FastAPI, Pandas, and SciPy – and by companies like Amazon, Hugging Face, LangChain, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and many more. still others.
Ruff’s growth has exceeded even the most ambitious expectations.
Beyond the numbers, I’m still amazed by the positivity around Ruff. It shines through in every interaction, every conversation. I feel extremely lucky to have found myself working on something that resonates so strongly with its users, so thank you to everyone who has helped make Ruff what it is today – contributors and users alike.
As an engineer myself, I understand that adopting a new tool is a big decision with a big, long-term impact. The fact that smart, serious people were willing to adopt a pre-0.1 project so early in its development gave Ruff the oxygen he needed to grow and thrive. Many established projects and companies now rely on Ruff to write code every day. I consider this both my greatest source of motivation and my most important responsibility. Thank you for your trust. I won’t give up.
For me, the response from the Ruff community is in itself proof of an opportunity: to make the Python ecosystem more productive by creating great tools. I get asked, almost daily, to extend Ruff to another problem space, another part of the Python toolchain.
Astral exists to seize this opportunity.
Prsentation d’Astral
Astral’s mission is to make the Python ecosystem more productive by creating powerful development tools. In short, we’re going to take the ideas behind Ruff to their extremes by (1) expanding Ruff itself and (2) building more things like Ruff.
When users first try Ruff, they often describe a feeling of disbelief. Astral is an attempt to bring that same feeling to more of the toolchain.
Some of the things we build will look like natural extensions of Ruff (for example, an auto-formatter); others will diverge from the theme of static analysis. But our North Star is pretty simple: make the Python ecosystem more productive by building tools that people love to use; fast, robust, intuitive and integrated tools.
To further our goals, we raised $4 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Caffeinated Capital, Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Solomon Hykes (Docker), David Cramer (Sentry), Wes McKinney (Voltron Data ), Nick Schrock (Elementl), and many more. They are investors and founders whom I have admired from afar for a long time. I am grateful for their support.
I think my decision to focus on Ruff full-time from the start was critical to its success: responding to issues in real time, shipping fixes the same day, maintaining a high speed of development – delivering on that promise required time. full focus. I believe that maintaining these high standards, while expanding the reach, requires a full-time team.
Raising funds gives us the ability to build this team (there are now three of us), to invest ourselves fully in the work, to support our community contributors and to build for the long term.
What’s the next step?
In fact, more of the same. While I can’t wait to reveal Astral to the world, this endeavor (and this fundraiser) allows us to continue on the path we have already taken. Ruff remains Ruff, and our work will remain open-source and permissively licensed. In the future, we will build and sell services on top of our tools – but the tools themselves will remain free and open source.
Our goal is to provide paid services that are better and easier to use than others by directly integrating our open-source offerings. We aim for these services to have as much impact as Ruff himself, but you can choose not to use them. Regardless, Ruff will remain free and open-source, as it is today.
From the beginning, Ruff has aimed to advance existing standards and integrate with the wider Python community (for example, you can use Ruff with isort, or use it as a replacement for isort; similarly, you you can use Ruff with Black, or use Ruff’s built-in autoformatter). That won’t change either. In fact, we consider it an essential element of our success.
In the same way, we will continue to build in an open way with our community. Ruff is my first experience as a large-scale open source maintainer, and it’s an intentional goal on my part to create a welcoming project and environment for new and old contributors alike. Although I’m still learning, we’ve had some early success here, and that will remain a priority; both for the project and for me personally. As always, you can find the core team on Discord and on GitHub. We will also be present at PyCon (for the first time, for me).
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