// the find
egoist/dum
An npm scripts runner written in Rust.
dum is a Rust CLI that replaces npm run/npx to skip Node's ~200ms startup cost when running npm scripts or node_modules/.bin binaries. It's for developers who run scripts constantly during a workday and feel every millisecond of CLI lag, not for teams needing a full package manager replacement.
The core claim checks out: a native binary genuinely avoids Node's process startup overhead, and the README backs it with a real hyperfine comparison (41ms vs 334ms) rather than a vague performance claim. It forwards install/add/remove to whatever package manager the lockfile indicates, so you're not forced to abandon npm/yarn/pnpm, just the slow parts of invoking them. Scope is deliberately narrow — it's a script runner, not a reimplementation of npm — which keeps the surface area small and the failure modes predictable.
The benchmark only compares against npm; pnpm and bun already start faster than npm, so if your team already moved off npm the actual win shrinks a lot and the README doesn't address that. There's no tests directory in the tree at all — five source files (main.rs, run.rs, install.rs, args.rs, prompt.rs) with no visible test coverage for something that shells out and forwards arguments, which is exactly the kind of code that breaks quietly on edge cases like quoting or monorepo paths. Last push was January 2025, so this has sat for over a year and a half with 1585 stars — worth checking open issues before adopting, since a stalled single-maintainer CLI tool is a risk if it breaks on a future npm/Node release. package.json vars (documented npm feature) are explicitly unsupported, which the author admits but hasn't fixed.