pnpm 69,400 ("performant npm 2,036 ") was started in January 2016 by Rico Sta. Cruz and has been led by Zoltan Kochan almost since. It fixes a waste other installers accepted: every project kept its own copy of every package. pnpm keeps one copy of each file per machine, links projects to it, and builds a strict node_modules. pnpm 11 (April 2026) moved its settings into pnpm-workspace.yaml and turned several safety checks on by default; pnpm 12 (August
is a rewrite in Rust, at 12.6.0 on this machine.