Volta – Fastest Node version manager in Rust

I switched to Volta since nvm (the most popular node version manager) was adding upwards of 500ms to my shell startup. I’m sure nvm is a well engineered tool, but it’s design requirements are that it is a POSIX shell script that runs at shell start up so it’s not very fast.

Volta takes a completely different approach by setting up shim symlinks, and so it’s much faster in the ways that I notice.

Volta development isn’t the most active but the maintainers have been working on shipping version bumps.

Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

https://asdf-vm.com/