Faster than Node's native parseEnv? No, way. Yes. Yes, way. Dotenv's fast mode now beats Node's native parser on Node 22 and 24 across Linux and Windows in our benchmarks. Five months ago, the wildest PR ever landed in dotenv. Most contributions are small parser changes, type fixes, or feature proposals. This was a new parser, claiming 2x speedup. Some guy from Sweden, @pelaseyed. A character scanning approach. Pretty sick, tbh. So what did I do? What any maintainer does for a package depended on by tens of millions. I sat on it. lol. But we also got in touch. He and his cofounder run @superagent_ai, securing PRs. They generously offered to secure Dotenvx's, and today they do that for all kinds of open source projects—even Firecrawl. Back to Dotenv. The parser was contributed as a full replacement. That's too risky, so we put it behind a fast flag. On September 17th, five months after that initial PR, we released it. It's fast. With dotenv 18 or later: require('dotenv').config({ fast: true }) Or from the CLI: npx dotenv run --fast -- node index.js The community has already found edge cases, and we've patched them. That's exactly why we made it opt-in. Node's native parser still wins in some configurations. Full benchmark breakdown in the post below. Maintaining dotenv means maintaining the past while still moving .env forward. This parser is a small piece of that. Huge thank you to @pelaseyed and @superagent_ai for bringing it to the dotenv community. dotenvx.com/blog/2026/09/28/…