Why I Built pip-size: A Story About Obsession with Performance

It Started with a Simple Question "How fast is it?" That's the question I always ask when I write a Python package. Not "does it work?" — because obviously it works. The real question is: how fast is it compared to what already exists? I've been building high-performance Python libraries for years. Libraries like: yyaml — a YAML parser pygixml — an XML parser serin — a serialization library ctoon — a image processing library novasvg — an SVG parser liburlparser — a URL parser And the results? In many cases, 20x to 100x faster than the mainstream alternatives. I have the benchmarks to prove it. I've spent countless hours profiling, optimizing, and benchmarking. I know exactly how fast my code runs. But there was one question I couldn't answer easily: "How big is it?" The Problem Nobody Talks About When you compare Python packages, everyone talks about: Features API simplicity Community support GitHub stars But nobody talks about download size . And that's a problem. Here's why: a packag