Comparison with asdf-vm

vfox and asdf-vm have the same goal, that is, a tool to manage all runtime versions, and all versions are recorded in the .tool-versions file.

But vfox has the following advantages:

Platform compatibility

Tool	Windows (non-WSL)	Linux	macOS
asdf-vm	❌	✅	✅
vfox	✅	✅	✅

asdf-vm is a Shell-based tool, so it does not support native Windows environments!

vfox is implemented in Golang + Lua, so it naturally supports Windows and other operating systems.

Performance comparison

The above figure is a benchmark test of the two tools' most core functions. It will be found that vfox is about 5 times faster than asdf-vm!

The reason why asdf-vm is slower is mainly due to its shim mechanism. Simply put, when you try to run a command like node, asdf-vm will first look for the corresponding shim, and then determine which version of node to use based on the .tool-versions file or global configuration. This process of finding and determining the version will consume a certain amount of time, thereby affecting the speed of command execution.

In contrast, vfox uses the direct operation of environment variables to manage versions, and it will directly set and switch environment variables, thereby avoiding the process of finding and determining the version. Therefore, vfox is much faster than asdf-vm using the shim mechanism.

asdf-vm ecosystem is very strong, but it is powerless for Windows native. Although vfox is very new, it does better in terms of performance and platform compatibility than asdf-vm.