The First Real Webpack Alternative (Written in Rust!)

webpack, parcel, rollup, vite, babel, snowpack, turbopack, rspack… 8 tools to do the same job, that’s how you know we’re on JavaScript

the rust slogan "Making Javascript better one step at a time".

Regarding the “rust multi-threading” is bad comment, I would like to address the confusion between async and multi-threading. These are not the same, and you can have async without multi-threading or visa versa. I do agree, async could be better, and there are several efforts to try and improve this for end users in the works. However, the multi-threading support in Rust is extremely good in my experience, and certainly better than JS/TS. Crates like Rayon will take you surprisingly far, and often result in near identical code to the single-threaded version but with X times the performance.

We moved to Rspack in prod about 6 months ago, purely because we needed the performance improvement but didn't have time to migrate to another solution. The 1:1 mapping from webpack make things really easy. It's not all been perfect, but it's been such a big uptick in performance that it's been completely worth the migration. Glad to see it reach 1.0 now too!

teh vite build comparison wasn't quite fair, since it was also doing type checking..

Zack is a legend! Hopped on an hour long call last week helping me figure out the code-splitting story for TanStack Router.

I think we aren't have bundlers fatigue. In frontend, people usually use Vite and Webpack for production. Why? Because they're trusted Webpack (Old but gold) Parcel (Not so popular. Author spends more time on LightningCSS) Rollup (More often you can see Rollup as a part of something more complex, like Vite) Snowpack (Not maintained anymore. Author made Astro) ESBuild (More often you can see ESBuild as a part of something more complex, like Vite) Vite (That's the way) SWC (More often you can see SWC as a part of something more complex, like plugins for Vite or Webpack) Turbopack (Still waiting for production) Rolldown (Not ready. WIP) RSPack (Public alpha) Bun (Bun no longer has a dev server and its bundler is largely an ESBuild Zig port) Farm (As Vite but in Rust. Not so popular)

Rust mentioned let's go!!!!!

The reason why I love Rspack/Rsbuild is its practicality - a mostly easy migration story from Webpack, while offering good performance. I really don't give a crap about other more performant solutions when every company I've worked in has miserably complex Webpack config!

We've switched to Rspack in production for one legacy custom create react app config (with custom aliases, styled components, sass) in my squad. The gains compared to CRA were insane, build times dropped by at least 60%. All of that with a very easy migration (done in a single PR with around 200 lines changed). We've tried to migrate to Vite in the past, but that came with a huge pain due to the needed webpack interop. Rspack is a great alternative to projects where a migration to Vite is hard and Webpack compatibility is needed (e.g.: for module federation usage).