Concepts

How rstest works, and why it's built that way:

• Architecture — Rust orchestrator, Python workers, the vendored pytest core
• Compatibility — the contract, what's verified, known gaps
• Scheduling — item dispatch, duration cache, chunk locality, the serial phase
• Lazy collection — on-demand per-file collection and work-stealing
• Crash handling — attribution, redistribution, restart budgets
• Monorepo mode — discovery, worker budget, per-flag behavior across projects
• xdist hook emulation — how master-side hooks are emulated, and where they diverge
• Caching — what lives in .rstest_cache and .pytest_cache
• Glossary