The vlt team was in Waterford and Dublin last week to attend NodeConf EU and the Node.js Collaborator Summit and to share the first public version of thevlt Client and Serverless Registry that we've been working onsince launching the company.

"How to Build a Faster Package Manager"

Isaac Schlueter kicked things off with the opening talk of the conference titled "How to Build a Faster Package Manager". It was a technical dive into the specific needs of a package manager and strategies to make it as fast as possible.

He also sharedfull screen graphs with unlabeled axes showing how blazing fast vlt is the following quote from the creator of another package manager on how we approach benchmarks:

The talk also presciently touched on the question we ended up getting most often since launching: "why". The tl;dr is: we have a lot more ideas on the future of JavaScript package and project management. We'll be sure to share the full video of the talk once it becomes available.

Workshop

Next on the agenda was a workshop led by Ruy Adorno and I showcasing some of the features available in our newly released client and registry:

• Usingvlt gui andvlt query tovisualize your dependency graph directly in the browser
• Running thevlt Serverless Registry as a proxy with advanced authentication and token management

We walked attendees through runningvlt install to build a large dependency graph in a monorepo of their favorite frontend framework and thenvlt gui to go dependency spelunking through many 1000s of packages.

You can do the same in your project today by runningvlt gui , which is is a non-destructive command that will only read from current node_modules directory. You can also runrm -rf node_modules && vlt install first to get the full vlt experience. And pleasereport any bugs that you find!

The Booth

We spent the rest of the conference hanging out at the vlt booth to answer questions, demo more vlt use cases, and hand out shiny stickers. If you missed us at NodeConf EU you can come hang out at thevirtual vlt booth on Bluesky. And if you want to learn where we're going to be next, sign up for ourmailing list.

Node.js Collaborator Summit

The rest of the week was spent in Dublin attending theNode.js Collaborator Summit hosted at theBaseline Community and Workspace. Node.js collaborators spent two days discussing various topics on the future of the runtime.

Of particular interest to the vlt team was the session onCJS/ESM interoperability which touched on support for single executable applications (SEA). Weplan to ship a future version of the vlt client as a compiled executable which would allow for faster performance and eliminating users needing a compatible runtime already installed.

This is Just the Beginning!

If you want to say hi or have any questions aboutvlt orvsr, come join us inDiscord.

To follow development more closely, you can watch thevltpkg monorepo for releases to thevlt client and thevsr repo for the serverless registry.