Pnpm 12 quietly swapped the install engine for rust. pnpm's own benchmark
pnpm 12 quietly swapped the install engine for rust. pnpm's own benchmark: clean install of a file-heavy fixture drops from 8.2s to 5s, cached warm install from 472ms to 15ms.
the lockfile war just became a compiler war.
Context
pnpm's own benchmarks page lists a file-heavy fixture called alotta-files. In the version I read, a clean install takes 7.34 seconds on pnpm 11 (v11.28.2) and 4.34 seconds on pnpm 12 (v12.8.2). The warm best run is 16 ms. A GitHub issue describes pnpm 12 as the Rust rewrite with near-complete parity, with validation against popular workspaces still pending.
The note's figures of 8.2 to 5 seconds and 472 ms to 15 ms are not on the page I read. They may come from a different version or an earlier snapshot of the page, which does not make them wrong. That the lockfile war became a compiler war is the author's opinion.
Related work
- pnpm 12 release post ↗The rewrite announcement.
Watch next
- The page history of pnpm.io/benchmarks.
Sources
- pnpm benchmarkspnpm.io
- pnpm 12 Rust rewrite tracking issuegithub.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 4 September 2026 at 16:03 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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