Charlie Marsh, former Spring Discovery and Khan Academy staff engineer, has announced the launch of his new company, Astral, to build developer tools for the Python ecosystem. The company is based on the successful release of Ruff, a fast Python linter written in Rust, which has gained significant traction. Reacting to the release, developers said, “Rust is eating Python like it did JavaScript.”
In just two months since its initial release, Ruff has garnered over one million monthly downloads and has been embraced by Airflow, FastAPI, Pandas, and SciPy. Tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix have also adopted Ruff for their development workflows. The overwhelming support and adoption of Ruff have validated Marsh’s belief that Python tooling could be significantly faster.
What sets Ruff apart from other linters in the market is its exceptional speed.Ruff is approximately 150 times faster on macOS compared to Flake8, 75 times faster than pycodestyle, and 50 times faster than pyflakes and pylint.
The advantages of Ruff, as listed by the developer, include its second-mover advantage, having learned from existing tools in the market. Ruff also offers deduplicated work, enabling it to perform multiple tasks at once, which would require multiple linters to parse through the code separately. Furthermore, Ruff’s performance is attributed to Rust being faster than Python.
To propel the growth of Astral and continue developing Ruff, Marsh has raised $4 million in seed funding, led by Accel, a leading venture capital firm known for backing successful tech startups. Other investors are Caffeinated Capital, Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Solomon Hykes (Docker), David Cramer (Sentry), Wes McKinney (Voltron), and Nick Schrock (Elementl), among others..
In the release statement, Marsh expressed his excitement about the future of Astral and his commitment to pushing the boundaries in the Python ecosystem. He believes Astral will empower developers to build cutting-edge applications with ease.
