The Rustification of Web Tools
JavaScript is fast enough for interaction, but too slow for compilation. The entire web build chain is being rewritten in Rust.
For a long time, the tools we used to write JavaScript were themselves written in JavaScript. Webpack, Babel, ESLint, Prettier—they all ran on Node.js. And for a long time, that was fine. But as applications grew to tens of thousands of modules, the cracks started to show.
Waiting 30 seconds for a dev server to start or 5 minutes for a CI build to complete became the norm. This wasted developer time helps no one. Enter Rust.
Why Rust?
Rust offers memory safety without garbage collection, meaning it can run incredibly close to the metal with predictable performance characteristics. When you're parsing millions of lines of code in an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), this performance difference isn't just incremental; it's exponential.
The Benchmarks
Let's look at the numbers. Comparing legacy JS tools against their modern Rust counterparts on a large Monorepo with 50,000 components.
| Task | Legacy Tool (JS) | Modern Tool (Rust) | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transpilation | Babel (24s) | SWC (0.4s) | 60x Faster |
| Bundling | Webpack (45s) | Turbopack (2s) | 22x Faster |
| Linting | ESLint (12s) | Biome (0.2s) | 60x Faster |
The New Titans
1. Turbopack
Developed by Vercel and the creator of Webpack, Turbopack uses a revolutionary specific incremental architecture. It never re-does work. If you change one file, it only re-computes the minimal transformation graph needed for that file. It powers the Next.js dev server, making instant HMR (Hot Module Replacement) a reality regardless of app size.
2. Biome (formerly Rome)
Biome is an ambitious project to unify the entire toolchain. Instead of having separate parsers for Prettier (formatting) and ESLint (linting), Biome does both in a single pass. This saves massive amounts of CPU cycles because the code is only parsed into an AST once.
3. Rolldown
Evan You, the creator of Vue and Vite, is currently working on Rolldown. It's a Rust port of Rollup. Since Vite is arguably the most popular build tool today, replacing its internal bundler (Rollup/Esbuild) with a unified Rust-based solution will bring massive performance gains to millions of developers.
Is JavaScript Dead on the Backend?
No. JavaScript (and TypeScript) remains the best language for expressing product logic. It's flexible, expressive, and easier to hire for. But the infrastructure running that code—the compilers, the linters, the deploy agents—will almost exclusively be written in systems languages like Rust.