Ruff v0.15.0: The Python Tool That Makes Everything Else Look Pathetically Slow
Ruff v0.15.0: The Python Tool That Makes Everything Else Look Pathetically Slow
Just when you thought Python tooling couldn't get any faster, Astral dropped Ruff v0.15.0 on February 3rd, 2026. And honestly? It's making every other linter and formatter look like they're running on a potato from 2005.
Image credit: Astral
The Speed That Breaks Reality
Let's get this straight: Ruff is 10-100x faster than Flake8 and Black. We're not talking about incremental improvements here; we're talking about the difference between walking to work and teleporting. Sebastián Ramírez, the creator of FastAPI, literally said he sometimes adds intentional bugs just to confirm Ruff is actually running. That's how absurdly fast it is.
Nick Schrock from Elementl reported that pylint takes 2.5 minutes on their 250k LOC codebase, while Ruff clocks in at 0.4 seconds. That's not an optimization—that's a completely different paradigm. If you're still waiting around for your CI pipeline to finish linting, I have bad news: you're wasting your life.
v0.15.0: The Update That Actually Matters
Most version bumps are boring. This one? Actually packed with features that developers will actually use. Let's break down what's new:
Block Suppressions: Finally
You know how painful it is when you have legacy code that violates every PEP 8 naming convention under the sun, and you have to slap # noqa: N803 on every single parameter? Ruff v0.15.0 introduces block-level suppressions with ruff: disable and ruff: enable comments. One line to disable a rule, one line to re-enable it. It's almost like they actually care about developer experience.
The 2026 Style Guide
Ruff's formatter got some serious love this release. Lambda parameters now stay on the same line (thank god), and lambda bodies can be parenthesized to break across multiple lines. This aligns more closely with Black's formatting while actually being, you know, readable.
For Python 3.14 users (you early adopters, you), Ruff now enforces the new unparenthesized exception syntax from PEP 758. Instead of except (A, B, C):, you get except A, B, C:. It's the little things that make you realize how much syntax bloat we've been tolerating.
Image credit: Astral
Sixteen New Rules, Countless Stabilizations
Sixteen lint rules graduated from preview to stable status, including blocking HTTP calls in async functions, unnecessary lambdas, and empty collection membership tests. Plus, behaviors that were only available in preview mode are now stable. Astral is actually stabilizing features at a pace that makes other projects look comatose.
The Astral Ecosystem Is Getting Scary Good
Here's what's really happening: Astral is quietly building an entire Python toolchain. Ruff handles linting and formatting. uv is a package manager that makes pip look ancient. ty is their upcoming type checker. They're not just building tools; they're architecting a future where Python development feels like a modern language ecosystem.
The fact that Ruff can replace Black, Flake8 (plus dozens of plugins), isort, pydocstyle, pyupgrade, and autoflake—while being orders of magnitude faster than any of them individually—should tell you everything. The consolidation alone saves setup time, configuration hell, and cognitive load. But the speed? That's just rubbing it in.
The Community Has Spoken
Major projects are adopting Ruff en masse: FastAPI, Pandas, PyTorch, Hugging Face, Django—you know, just the entire Python ecosystem. When the people building the frameworks you use daily have switched, it's probably time to ask yourself why you're still waiting for Black to finish formatting.
Bryan Van de Ven, co-creator of Bokeh, said it best: "Ruff is ~150-200x faster than flake8 on my machine, scanning the whole repo takes ~0.2s instead of ~20s. This is an enormous quality of life improvement for local dev." Quality of life improvement? That's underselling it. It's a sanity preservation tool.
The Bottom Line
Ruff v0.15.0 isn't just another release—it's another reminder that Python tooling was broken for years, and someone finally decided to fix it properly. Between the new block suppressions, the 2026 style guide improvements, and the relentless march toward feature parity with every tool it's replacing, Ruff is making the competition look irrelevant.
If you haven't switched yet, honestly, what are you waiting for? Your time is worth more than the effort it takes to pip install ruff.
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