Windows has always been notoriously awful for deleting directories with many many files and subdirectories (looking at you, node_modules). rimraf has enjoyed well deserved success drastically improving this (>3x faster than powershell's Remove-Item -Recurse, 100M downloads a week on npm), but recently released rmbrr has carved out another ~70% speed gain over rimraf on windows with a rust implementation using an aggressive parallelization strategy and direct win32 POSIX delete api calls. Early benchmarking also shows improvement on other operating systems, but being cross platform here is more about tooling normalization as unix systems don't really feel the same pain the NT kernel imposes on large scale delete operations.
Windows has always been notoriously awful for deleting directories with many many files and subdirectories (looking at you, node_modules). rimraf has enjoyed well deserved success drastically improving this (>3x faster than powershell's Remove-Item -Recurse, 100M downloads a week on npm), but recently released rmbrr has carved out another ~70% speed gain over rimraf on windows with a rust implementation using an aggressive parallelization strategy and direct win32 POSIX delete api calls. Early benchmarking also shows improvement on other operating systems, but being cross platform here is more about tooling normalization as unix systems don't really feel the same pain the NT kernel imposes on large scale delete operations.