Software Engineering Daily pnpm with Zoltan Kochan
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Sep 18, 2025 Zoltan Kochan, a full-stack web developer and the creator of the fast, disk-efficient package manager pnpm, joins open-source advocate Josh Goldberg. They dive into the inefficiencies of traditional JavaScript package management and how pnpm addresses these challenges. Zoltan shares his journey from .NET to JavaScript, discusses pnpm's unique features like workspaces and symlinks, and explores future trends in package management. The conversation ends on a lighter note, revealing Zoltan's passion for spicy food.
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Speed And Disk Pain Sparked pnpm
- Zoltan found pnpm while working on a 140-component monorepo at JustAnswer where npm installs were painfully slow and duplicated disk usage.
- Switching to pnpm immediately reduced install time and disk usage, motivating him to work on the project.
Hoisting Explains Flat node_modules
- NPM v3 changed node_modules to a flat, hoisted layout to avoid deep nesting and Windows path limits.
- Hoisting moves many dependencies to the project root and can deduplicate but also chooses single versions at top-level.
Symlinked Store Keeps node_modules Compact
- pnpm uses symlinks to map root entries to a hidden .pnpm store that keeps packages versioned and isolated.
- Node.js resolves modules by real locations, letting pnpm present a compact root while dependencies live in .pnpm.
