mise

Since our last assessment, mise has evolved from a high-performance alternative to asdf into a default frontend for the development environment. We’re moving it to Adopt because it consolidates three fragmented concerns — tool and language versioning, environment variable management and task execution — into a single high-performance, Rust-based tool, configured through a declarative mise.toml file. mise is easy to set up and works well with CI/CD pipelines. It also adds a layer of supply chain security through integration with Cosign and GitHub Artifact Attestations, which is often missing from other version managers.

For teams looking to standardize their developer environment setup, mise has become our recommended default. In polyglot environments with multiple microservices, this is especially useful when codebases adopt new language versions at the same time. Best of all, mise also works with existing language-specific tooling, so teams do not need to migrate all at once.

Developers working in a polyglot environment often find themselves having to manage multiple versions of different languages and tools. mise aims to solve that problem by providing one tool to replace nvm, pyenv, rbenv and rustup, among others, and is a drop-in replacement for asdf. Mise is written in Rust for shell interaction speed, and unlike asdf which uses shell-based shims, mise modifies the PATH environment variable ahead of time, so the tool run times are called directly. This is partly why mise is faster than asdf. For those developers already familiar with asdf, it provides the same functionality but with a few key differences. Being written in Rust, it's faster and has a few features that asdf doesn't, such as the ability to install multiple versions of the same tool at the same time and more forgiving commands, including fuzzy matching. It also provides an integrated task runner, useful for things like running linters, tests, builders, servers and other tasks that are specific to a project. If you're a bit fed up with having to use multiple tools to manage your development environment as well as the at times clunky syntax of other tools, mise is definitely worth a look.