The JavaScript package manager pnpm has released version 12, a complete rewrite of its core in Rust that cuts installation times by up to 90 percent. Despite the rewrite, lead maintainer Zoltan Kochan says the upgrade is fully backward-compatible, preserving pnpm 11's commands, flags, settings and lockfile format, making it relevant to the many developers who rely on pnpm for managing large JavaScript monorepos.

In the project's own benchmarks, pnpm 12 installed a sample uncached package in 5.19 seconds versus 8.22 seconds for pnpm 11 and 47.7 seconds for npm; pairing it with a new Rust-built registry server called pnpr cut this further to 3.37 seconds. The new core, developed since April, is now 65.9 percent Rust and 33.5 percent TypeScript, removing overhead caused by routing filesystem work through Node.js. Pnpm, created in 2016 as a faster alternative to npm, was used by around 38 percent of developers surveyed for monorepo work in 2025, and its rewrite follows similar Rust-driven speed-ups in tools such as Bun, Tailwind CSS and Vite.