The First Real Webpack Alternative (Written in Rust!) 

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.

Maybe in a few years Js devs will rewrite their backend in a actually performant language too.

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

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!

re threading in rust; the entire point of rust is to be unopinionated about how threading and event loop works; its not in the standard library *intentionally* in order to enable alternate implementations optimised for eg for embedded systems

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

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

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)

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!

As a Rust dev (and a begrudging FE dev) this is so exciting. I love oxidizing my stack as much as possible.

Rust mentioned let's go!!!!!

JS has no compilers so it's never will be faster than Rust compiler. JS only has transpilers and bundlers.

I don't think rust's multithreading is hard at all... compared to like c/c++. You also don't HAVE to use async or tokio for multithreading, unless you do so much io workload that it makes sense.

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).

multithreading in Rust is fine. Async is ok, could be better.

Rust is the only major programming language that won't compile code with data races in it. Rust's threading model is great.

Jesus, we are only just in the process of migrating to esbuild from WebPack. Are you telling me we are alread betting on the wrong horse AGAIN?

rsbuild is what you want, its a better DX built on top of rspack

dude this is insane I am working on a internship at a company Just for testing i changed the build tool from vite to rsbuild the difference vite build time :- real 1m24.612s rsbuild build time :- real 0m12.510s Laptop specs: Ryzen 3 - 4 cores 25W processor, 16 GB RAM To mind you this is a huge code base like very very huge.

we just moved to rsbuild and we are very very happy developers now 😁😁❤❤

13:40 "it was an attempt..." sounds like Biome isn't being worked on anymore. Biome is active and is the replacement for ESLint and Prettier. It won't be a replacement at the moment if you have lot of custom ESLint rules or rely on some specific typescript-eslint rules for example, but for many projects it is a suitable replacement today and is an awesome tool. I would highly recommend checking it out for anyone looking for a way faster ESLint and Prettier alternative.

Been using RSpack for a month now since 0.7, onboarded quite easy and includes some sane defaults (that you can opt out) for some common builds like react. Pretty much what Vite does.

threading isn't concurrency Rust has excellent first class threading (albeit limited by the OS threading libs). Async is the real issue since the semantics are just terrible. The core team doesn't want to push for one established run time so we get a shitshow until they do.

aside from node_modules bloat for binaries, it's also potentially insecure. Especially on something like npm that doesn't verify the package in the registry was built from the listed source code...

i mean at this point even my mom is getting a rewrite in Rust by some random dude on github

Let's go 300k subs 📈

I'm a big fan of Webpack, but the build process can be quite slow at times. Webpack 5 has improved this a bit, but external plugins and tools can still slow it down. As much as I like Webpack, I absolutely loath configuring it. For that task, I have switched to using the symfony/webpack-encore library provided by the Symfony PHP project. By default it is configured to split scripts based on entrypoints and generate a manifest file that maps assets generated to each individual entrypoint. The manifest file requires special handling on the server side to include the necessary assets for the given entrypoint/page. This of course isn't needed for single page apps as everything is either bundled together or you use Webpack's built-in script loader. Plugins are available for various server-side frameworks that simplify injecting the necessary assets into a page.

Whats hilarious about Farm is that they claim to be compatible with Vite... except for the fact that it has an entirely different configuration schema, and missing a ton of actual useful options-have two different properties to define plugins, one for Farm-specific ones and another for Vite-which doesn't work well, either. Most of what makes Vite great is not just the dev environment, but also the use of Rollup for production builds. It's easier to configure than webpack, and often provides as good if not better results with less configurations and plugins. It just works. I can see Rspack and Rolldown as actual useful solutions to bundling, if they come to fruition. SWC is a good ESBuild alternative, but honestly I don't see that major benefits other than being a API that provides APIs for dealing with JavaScript source code in Rust. For that you could also just use Biome's crates.

If you want nice multi-threading: OCaml is shipping an effect runtime in version 5, with plans to introduces typed algebraic effects; which basically give you the power to build async await etc in user space (but also in a way that avoids the colored function problem because you can be generic over the color of the functions you take)

why no peace Nerds Today

Theo seems to conflate async and multithreading frequently

I have worked with Zack a while back. He is the guy that wrote module federation in webpack and got it working in Next

know this guys, he is awesome

are you only making the rspack video now that farm's out of beta?

Please talk about Module Federation, v2.0 was release not too long ago.

I did bundle split in webpack but was way cooler, faster to do it with gulp. I miss gulp and don’t miss it at the same time

The state of js. Another day another tool.

The biggest downside of rust is that it keeps making javascript faster which means javascript devs have less reason to switch away from javascript and to rust. Javascript can't keep getting away with this!!!

What about makojs?!

Zack is cool. He kick started micro front end via Module Federation in webpack.

farm has completed the incremental build feature. You can try it. It is faster.

as long as we get one new build tool per week javascript is not dead!

5:56 build Docker/OCI containers and just deploy the old container from your registry.

i moved to vite long ago. not moving again. 2024 is the year of build tools it seems.

Hey theo, what's that "time" command that you are prefixing with? I wanna know it too.😮 Rspack is sure awesome.

idk what any of this web stuff is, i just love rust

Rust. Blazingly fast.

I'll read that (docs whatever) myself.

Personally, I never found threads to be all that difficult and most of the time I was using pthreads for my threading purposes. Now that C11 added threads to the standard library and the implementation I'm using, gcc on Linux, basically just thinly wraps pthreads anyway and I have to add -lpthreads to the linker options if I use them. So I'm not sure why so many people complain about threading. However, I do wish that we could replace the entirety of the web infrastructure. Just completely wipe out HTML/CSS/JS and start from scratch. It'd be nice if bundlers weren't a thing and instead a webpage could just be simpler than they are now but provide similar functionality. Something akin to a web browser scripting a UI library instead of attempting to implement an entire OS inside of the already running OS.

what is that tmux up time man 😅

Given enough time; all code rusts.

Sheriff of JS Mr Theo!

Lmao, Rust is here to fix the web's biggest mistakes. I love it, i want Rust in the Frontend, Backend, everything.

I thought Vite was a webpack alternative...

What do you mean webpack doesn't do HMR? That's like the OG HMR implementation? :)

i did those perf compare, and idk what is going on but turbopack was WAY slower

nixpack by railway is also there

"The channel axioms in go are shit" ... uhhh what?

Rust is a bit weird looking, but it's only slower to Fortran, it's got WASM, it's not owned by anyone and is backed by AWS, MS and a few others.

I have stuck around with Vite, and since my first framework was actually Svelte, I just sticked with Rollup and so far it's been good enough. I don't see the reason to learn all of these bundler APIs and ecosystems just to bot use them and forget everything in a year...

why does theo's terminal looks like a racecar? me want

And everyone was wondering why did the State of JS survey came out the way it did...

Do you really need this unless you’re Nexting? Personally, I like smaller bundlers that are less weird.

Bytedance has been releasing some good OSS nowadays, loving this direction

Why do you use new born tools in production?

Here’s a question: how many years will it be before tech companies have policies that restrict any open source code that has *any* supply chain dependencies on any code or services written by bytedance (or any other company that would be under the influence of Chinas spy services) Btw im not making a judgement about whether we should do that, but that would be the natural and logical extension to the latest US policy. Look at the polyfill exploit if you’re thinking this whole idea is crazy.

I'm a bit salty about Rust only supporting monolithic binaries. But I'm still glad they didn't use C++...

When is Cypress's turn to be rewritten in Rust?

I think you want to look at FARM

16:35 deno :(

9:03 try C# and you'll know how easy should be!

pnpm mentioned

rust mentioned

Thoughts about backend ?

Official TS Server in Rust, when?

7:56 i know what u are

Any research thesis topic idea for web development and cloud?

Have you heard about Vite?

why doesn't he use BUN? Did I miss something?

What happened to Vite!?

Oh, this is a Bytedance product? Im out. I'll stick to my other bundler options

I thought turbo was written in rust?

I just deploy my app with aws s3 cp xD

14:23 that's an aside... but also a problem ? Also question: are we shipping lots of Rust that needs to be compiled per architecture or are we also getting WASM ?

Isn't bun enough? Still not clear why re-write it in Rust? This suggests a major flaw in Javascript and admission of defeat.

No way. Haven't they abandoned it and started Rolldown which is a re-write of Rollup?

Rsbuild, copyright byte dance

The main problem with rust async is that it needs to integrate with many different runtimes. Which gives you access to really cool/cursed stuff like interrupt based async runtimes for embedded systems. This comes with the issue that Rust can't assume anything about the way an async function will be run (and also the type system was not powerful enough to represent async functions in interfaces (traits)), thus, you are missing a lot of common functionality in the standard library (AsyncIO interfaces, AsyncIterator, etc). Languages like Go and Beam-based languages, have an async executor built in, this allows them to make more assumptions about how an async function may be run, and provide better tools as a consequence. Additionally, an early decision was to make all types memcpyable, this seemed like a good idea (why would a type ever not be memcpyable?), but it turns out that async heavily uses self referential types (which are not memcpyable), and thus we get Pin (go read Pin and suffering from fasterthanlime on why this is an issue). A lot of people are working on improving this and I'm hopeful the state of things will improve, but it looks to be a 2-5 year endeavor...

Thanks! Another great reminder to stay away from the giant complex spaghetti cauldron that is Javascript.

They just frontloaded the compile time into the Rust code base 😏

I like rust based tooling. Rust is not nice for web stuff though

I've never understood why JS has invaded development tools instead of being confined to its area of use: browsers.

I prefer Farm.

Uhm, you’re still dressed wrong for the occasion, it is black hoodie dress code

You keep complaining about threading in Rust but I don't think you know what you're talking about. Although *async* has some issues (arguably not that bad), *threading* can be used without async in Rust and is often super easy to get right.

I'm just doubting that everything will be replaced by Rust at this point. Softwares, terminals, tools, languages, websites, IDEs, embedded systems, kernels, operating systems and more are fully being rewrite in Rust. Well that's just me tbf.

Am I the only one pronouncing "Rspack" as "Respect"?

how come you got that tshirt?!? how much did rspack paid you to do this video Theoo!!?!?!?! just kidding ofc great vid

when you have 300MB of JS it's not a bundler problem though