pnpm 12.0 is a Rust rewrite that keeps your pnpm 11 workflow intact
pnpm 12.0 is now stable, a full rewrite in Rust that deliberately avoids breaking changes: all commands, flags, settings, and the lockfile format from pnpm 11 carry over. The release focuses on performance and correctness, with notable improvements like canonical lockfiles for cyclic dependency graphs (2–3× faster peer resolution on large workspaces), hardlink-first installs on Linux, and a new project-aware global bin feature that lets globally installed Node.js, Deno, or Bun follow the version pinned by the current project. It also introduces registry revisions for patching published packages without changing version numbers, and pnpm can now provision other package managers like npm, Yarn, and Bun for git dependencies and `pnx`.
The lockfile therefore becomes a pure function of the dependency graph — reordered importers, reordered dependencies, and repeated installs all produce byte-identical lockfiles, which they could not before.
- BlueGreenMagick
> It is a rewrite of pnpm in Rust
Their benchmarks[0] report that a clean install with lockfile is about 3x times faster (7s -> 2.2s) and a no-op install is about 29x times faster (517ms -> 18ms)
- 1matin
Whenever you see a lot of long dashes (—) in a writing, there's a high chance Claude has written it.
- deanc
I'm curious, as it's not mentioned, are there any performance improvements as part of this rewrite?
- norman784
I got to the conclusion that boring is good enough, for me NPM is the best tool, is not that fast, but the installation speed is not that bad, considering how many times I need to run from scratch, the difference does not matter, it is stable and it's the default Node package manager, so I don't need to bother to install in CI any other tool, etc. My experience for long living projects is to stick with the defaults, because in a few years third party tools will change, it happen to my team with Yarn classic, now that we are with vanilla Node and NPM no worries, same with 3rd party dependencies, just use as less as possible.
- fwlr
Had to check the calendar to be sure it wasn’t somehow April 1st. No, it’s August. Huh.
I don’t see how it’s possible that the pnpm maintainers are unaware of the bun AI-rewrite-to-rust saga… so I’m baffled, befuddled, and overall at a loss to make sense of this decision.