Deinventing the Wheel
summary
PyPI stores about 66 TB of packages and roughly 50TB of binaries (≈75%), and that explosion owes to per-OS/arch prebuilt wheels. Zig provides a toolchain that can cross-compile C/C++ reliably from one host to many targets, offers Zig CC as a clang-compatible drop‑in and a reproducible build path, and includes Zig build to fetch and build deps, a workflow already used at scale (Uber) to avoid shipping dozens of platform blobs.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 3:22Why Python needs low-level
- 7:44The C toolchain problem
- 8:49The role of Python wheels
- 12:04Binary distribution issues
- 14:17Introduction to Zig
- 17:39Zig in the Python workflow
- 21:11Wheels versus source
- 24:35Package index stats
- 29:44Future packaging ideas
- 31:58Questions and answers
related talks
40mBuilding a binary extension
12mChallenge Accepted: Python Packaging Infrastructure for the RISCV64 Ecosystem
24mThe wheelhouse of horrors
27mPython in Bazel
25mInside the Cheeseshop: How Python Packaging Works
24mA tale of Python C extensions and cross-platform wheels
29mTaking wheels mobile
26mPhantom Dependencies: is your requirements.txt haunted?
