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We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

blog.railway.com

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Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#11

Post by thibran »

Hamuko wrote: post #8
maccard wrote: post #3

It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that we have gotten to a point that building a web frontend takes longer than compiling the Linux kernel..

As a non-frontend developer mainly observing and touching something here and there, a lot of the things that frontend developers do seem vastly over-engineered.

Isn't the main problem that the building blocks the modern web is based on are not a good fit for what we do with it?

CSS is a total mess. HTML is a mess. JS is okay, but is not a high quality language.

We would save so much time and money if we would have a modern base to build on. Sadly this will probably never happen, because company interests will try to corrupt the process and therefore destroy it.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#13

Post by Kelteseth »

UserMark wrote: post #10

I have a Nextjs heavy app which takes around 7 minutes currently. But I've been thinking of moving away from next for a long time now. TanStack seems to be a good fit. This gives me a bit more confidence in just doing it.

As a cpp developer I had to chuckle there. And I thought our compile times were bad.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#15

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

The irony is deploying NextJS on the railway platform is super slow since they use containers, on Vercel 2 min is like 12 min on railway, deployments on a vps are only like 20 seconds.

*I know this is just build time, so this is different then their deployement time

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#17

Post by abustamam »

UserMark wrote: post #10

I have a Nextjs heavy app which takes around 7 minutes currently. But I've been thinking of moving away from next for a long time now. TanStack seems to be a good fit. This gives me a bit more confidence in just doing it.

I've been pretty happy with TanStack start for a medium-sized project. I would not know how its build time would compare to Next, but our similarly sized Remix (sorry, React router v7) app takes longer to build.

TanStack just has a nicer mental model overall and works great with TanStack query for cache I validation and stuff like that.

Remix was promising but there was so much ceremony in registering API routes and stuff. Tanstack just lets you define server functions arbitrarily with no ceremony.

Might be worth a spike and some tokens to ask Claude Code to migrate and test the build time and ergonomics.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#19

Post by abustamam »

mlnj wrote: post #6

This is one of the most frustrating thing about working with NextJS. There seems to be no way to improve the speed of building the app.

I've used the other major meta frameworks (remix and tanstack). I don't think there is a way to improve the speed of building the app in those ecosystems. Happy to be proven wrong.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#20

Post by mellosouls »

abustamam wrote: post #18
mellosouls wrote: post #2

Reminder, as its not mentioned: Next.js is produced by Vercel, a competitor to Railway.

It's not mentioned because it's not relevant.

Of course it should be mentioned, it's a basic disclaimer.
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