Migrating Nx core to Rust & deprecating custom runners

UPDATE: Thank you for engaging with us. We took your feedback very seriously and clarified a few things. Most importantly, self-hosted remote caching provided by Nx Powerpack is free for small businesses and OSS projects. See here and here for more information.

We also added new ways of getting feedback and involve the community. See here.

Hi folks,

We are migrating Nx core from TypeScript to Rust, with a target completion date of 2025. The main reasons are to improve Nx's speed, reduce its package size, and enable a more powerful command-line interface.

While the rewrite to Rust brings many benefits, it also introduces some limitations, particularly with extensibility APIs. One example is the rarely-used API that allowed users to completely swap out Nx's task runner. While this offered theoretical "infinite" flexibility, it also meant Nx couldn't provide direct support for the use cases it enabled, leading us to discourage its use. In fact, we stopped generating any task runners properties in new Nx workspaces several years ago.

Despite the flexibility, very few concrete use cases for custom task runners emerged. The most common was larger teams wanting to use a self-hosted remote cache. Many such teams now use Nx Cloud (which starts free for small teams), but some still value the ability to choose their own solution.

To address this, we've introduced Nx Powerpack, which includes a dedicated solution for remote caching. Powerpack users can opt for our S3 or shared filesystem cache via new Nx plugins. If your team needs additional plugins for remote caching, please contact us at powerpack-support@nrwl.io.

Another niche use of custom task runners was allowing Nx contributors to experiment with runtimes like Bun and Deno before they were officially supported. We encourage contributors to work with us directly to integrate such changes into Nx's open-source task runner.

We understand that this change would mean that some teams may need Nx Powerpack. While it's a premium product designed for professional teams, we know that every Nx user's situation is unique. We therefore have the following options available:

Open-source workspaces can use Nx Powerpack and its plugins for free, just like they have always been able to use Nx Cloud's Pro plan for free.
If you belong to a smaller team with limited resources but feel you would benefit from the features of Nx Powerpack, please contact us at powerpack-support@nrwl.io, and we will help you out.

Finally, if you have specific use cases for custom task runners that we haven't covered, don't hesitate to open an issue.

Thank you, Victor Savkin & Nx Core Team

nrwl / nx

Migrating Nx core to Rust & deprecating custom runners #28434