Turbopack, the successor to Webpack

As Lee Robinson mentioned and as I had said before [0], Rust and other compiled languages are the future of tooling. We should optimize for speed for tooling, not only whether people can contribute to it or not. We can always have a JS layer for configuration while the core runs in Rust, much like for many Python libraries, the interface is in Python while the computation happens in C++.

I was also looking forward to Rome (a linter, formatter and bundler also built in Rust but still under development) [1] but looks like Vercel beat them to the punch.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[1] https://rome.tools

Re: Turbopack, the successor to Webpack

#8

Post by minimaxir » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

hmillison wrote: post #5

samuelstros wrote: post #3

Vercel is on a streak. I am curious whether Turbopack elapses Vite like Vite elapsed Webpack over the past 12 months.

according to the article, Turbopack is 10-20x faster than Vite. I wonder how they were able to edge it out so significantly!

Rust is a hell of a drug.

Re: Turbopack, the successor to Webpack

#9

Post by maxfurman » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

hmillison wrote: post #5

samuelstros wrote: post #3

Vercel is on a streak. I am curious whether Turbopack elapses Vite like Vite elapsed Webpack over the past 12 months.

according to the article, Turbopack is 10-20x faster than Vite. I wonder how they were able to edge it out so significantly!

My guess is some combination of dropping support for older browsers, supporting fewer features, and optimizing for the common case at the expense of edge cases. In a few releases, once all those are added back in, it will be no faster than Vite.

Re: Turbopack, the successor to Webpack

#10

Post by Emigre_ » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

If it combines the flexibility of Webpack with the performance of esbuild this is going to be great.