Python is nice, and the programs are shorter and easier to read than the same in Rust. But right, package management is not as nice as with the Rust cargo build system.
Package quality is always a problem. For Rust I use the crates.io site and sort for number of downloads. Usually the more popular a library is, the better the quality and maintained it is. For example for the secp256k1 algorithm this is the search result:
https://crates.io/search?q=secp256k1&sort=downloads
The first library is just a wrapper around a C library, which I want to avoid, to avoid build problems on Windows. Second crate is really big, with lots of different signatures, but i wanted just secp256k1. So 3rd result looked good and I checked the documentation, github, test cases etc., and then I used it for my project (btw, all the 0.x.y packages don't mean beta quality in Rust, it is just a convention that the interface might change until the first 1.0.0 version).
But for larger applications, the lack of static typing in Python can be problem (which is the reason why they introduced type annotations in Python 3.9), and it is much slower and needs more memory, so you don't really want to process gigabytes of blockchain data with it, or use it for a high traffic network node. But I think for such tools like the brainwallet, Python is better than Rust, and I use it often for such tasks. A Python REPL (Python in interactive mode) is also one of the best hand calculator replacements
and very useful with Jupyter for interactive data manipulation and visualization.
Package quality is always a problem. For Rust I use the crates.io site and sort for number of downloads. Usually the more popular a library is, the better the quality and maintained it is. For example for the secp256k1 algorithm this is the search result:
https://crates.io/search?q=secp256k1&sort=downloads
The first library is just a wrapper around a C library, which I want to avoid, to avoid build problems on Windows. Second crate is really big, with lots of different signatures, but i wanted just secp256k1. So 3rd result looked good and I checked the documentation, github, test cases etc., and then I used it for my project (btw, all the 0.x.y packages don't mean beta quality in Rust, it is just a convention that the interface might change until the first 1.0.0 version).
But for larger applications, the lack of static typing in Python can be problem (which is the reason why they introduced type annotations in Python 3.9), and it is much slower and needs more memory, so you don't really want to process gigabytes of blockchain data with it, or use it for a high traffic network node. But I think for such tools like the brainwallet, Python is better than Rust, and I use it often for such tasks. A Python REPL (Python in interactive mode) is also one of the best hand calculator replacements
and very useful with Jupyter for interactive data manipulation and visualization.