It is easy to get JS build fatigue. But I love the fact that these competitors push the incumbents forward. SWC was one of the earlier Rust builders, which then became absorbed into Vercel and turned into Turbopack (is my understanding), and then we have Rome which turned into a Rust rewrite as Biome (though they are barely at the level of compilation), and the Vite team seems to be making progress as fast as their HMR system, with Vite 6 already looking quite impressive with its stack of open and modular Rust-based AST parser/compiler/linter (Oxc, originally another solo project like SWC) all the way up to the Rolldown bundler.
I'm curious to see what Rsbuild brings on top of this already very competitive space of Rust-based builders (and I haven't even mentioned the fantastic non-Rust ones like ESBuild!)
I would personally bet on Vite at this time because it's the most complete package with the most momentum, and it's already hit some of the best speeds out there. Plus I am really rooting for a Rust-based package that compiles well as WASM because I am very inclined towards projects that do a lot of code analysis/compilation in the browser.
It's supposed to be webpack plugin-and-API compatible, so if you already use webpack, hopefully not (much).
But is this constant turnover getting ridiculous in the web dev & JS ecosystem?
Yes. I simultaneously credit and blame facebook for starting it with yarn; after yarn, the trend of re-writing build tools seemed to become much more acceptable and trendy, especially since yarn (at the time) was multiple times faster than npm; you could argue it was worth it. But now we've reached a stage where the diversity of tools like npm, yarn and pnpm, now tools like ni (https://github.com/antfu-collective/ni) are emerging to manage the diversity.
I think this is getting out of hand, now there are n+1 of them.
I always set aside a day of the month for “JS Bullshit” to take care of the churn. It’s a flex day that can be rolled over from month to month and moved around to address emergencies, but an average of one JS Bullshit day a month is an inevitable fact of the universe.
In the past two years I have gone Webpack -> Parcel -> Webpack -> Vite -> Rollup
I live for the day bundlers are no longer needed.
The state of modern JS such that much of it does not work on the web by default is absurd.
All the work that's been spent building better and better bundlers would have been better spent fixing the blight that Node, CJS and the death of Bower caused to begin with.
How we ended up in a place where most JS is server-first and needs to be adapted for the web is beyond me.
I clicked the link and had a weird experience. Sort of a cold, solemn spirit overcame me as I was, once again, presented with a landing page complete with three to six prominently displayed buzzwords. Perhaps even deja vu, a la Groundhog Day, where I've been subjected to this same thing, over and over again. Framework. Rust. Javascript.
It is easy to get JS build fatigue. But I love the fact that these competitors push the incumbents forward. SWC was one of the earlier Rust builders, which then became absorbed into Vercel and turned into Turbopack (is my understanding), and then we have Rome which turned into a Rust rewrite as Biome (though they are barely at the level of compilation), and the Vite team seems to be making progress as fast as their HMR system, with Vite 6 already looking quite impressive with its stack of open and modular Rust-based AST parser/compiler/linter (Oxc, originally another solo project like SWC) all the way up to the Rolldown bundler.
I'm curious to see what Rsbuild brings on top of this already very competitive space of Rust-based builders (and I haven't even mentioned the fantastic non-Rust ones like ESBuild!)
I would personally bet on Vite at this time because it's the most complete package with the most momentum, and it's already hit some of the best speeds out there. Plus I am really rooting for a Rust-based package that compiles well as WASM because I am very inclined towards projects that do a lot of code analysis/compilation in the browser.
The better, faster, Rust-powered Vite is… Vite.
https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-voidzero-inc
It doesn’t matter to me unless it’s actually available for me to use.
The axis label on the chart is very strange.
<checks watch> oh, I see, it's time to rewrite my javascript builds again. My how the time flies.
It's supposed to be webpack plugin-and-API compatible, so if you already use webpack, hopefully not (much).
But is this constant turnover getting ridiculous in the web dev & JS ecosystem?
Yes. I simultaneously credit and blame facebook for starting it with yarn; after yarn, the trend of re-writing build tools seemed to become much more acceptable and trendy, especially since yarn (at the time) was multiple times faster than npm; you could argue it was worth it. But now we've reached a stage where the diversity of tools like npm, yarn and pnpm, now tools like ni (https://github.com/antfu-collective/ni) are emerging to manage the diversity.
I think this is getting out of hand, now there are n+1 of them.
I always set aside a day of the month for “JS Bullshit” to take care of the churn. It’s a flex day that can be rolled over from month to month and moved around to address emergencies, but an average of one JS Bullshit day a month is an inevitable fact of the universe.
it's straightforward to migrate from vite per the doc
According to them it’s about webpack not vite.
https://rsbuild.dev/community/releases/v1-0
And 30ms slower as vite at hmr is totally ruining my DX
In the past two years I have gone Webpack -> Parcel -> Webpack -> Vite -> Rollup
I live for the day bundlers are no longer needed.
The state of modern JS such that much of it does not work on the web by default is absurd.
All the work that's been spent building better and better bundlers would have been better spent fixing the blight that Node, CJS and the death of Bower caused to begin with.
How we ended up in a place where most JS is server-first and needs to be adapted for the web is beyond me.
Most JS can't be server side.
I think it’s more accurate to call title this “… - A Better Webpack?”
It’s a build tool that swaps an underlying Webpack process with a Rust-powered process which aims to be API-compatible. With the Webpack ecosystem.
The Vite developers are working on the analogous Vite replacement, which is an API-compatible Rust rewrite of Rollup: https://rolldown.rs/
“- A Better Vite?” is not part of the original title. Is that okay?
My favorite part is the question mark you left off of your quote ;P.
Good catch. Updated the comment!
If you use webpack and haven't looked into rspack you should! Can drop it in and speed up large webpack apps, currently investigating it at Sentry.
Title & H1: Rsbuild
Got a fair bit of attention 44 days ago (25 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41502473
strange that this link wasn't used, i guess: https://rsbuild.dev/community/releases/v1-0
RDD - "Rust driven development".
Interesting, it’s by a team from ByteDance. It all appears to be under the MIT license.
I think this is the better Webpack right? The better Vite is called Farm.
To be fair, both are improvements over the existing tools, if not entirely compatible.
rspack for webpack,rsbuild for vite
Ah another weekly bundler/build thing. What a miserable life in the frontend world. Please stop this.
does it have any Vite compatibility? or just webpack?
I clicked the link and had a weird experience. Sort of a cold, solemn spirit overcame me as I was, once again, presented with a landing page complete with three to six prominently displayed buzzwords. Perhaps even deja vu, a la Groundhog Day, where I've been subjected to this same thing, over and over again. Framework. Rust. Javascript.
whoa, did rust absorb the churn-loving former js devs?
Just what the world needs, another javascript bundler.
Copyright ByteDance? Ouch