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.
> SWC was one of the earlier Rust builders, which then became absorbed into Vercel and turned into Turbopack (is my understanding)
SWC and Turbopack aren't related in the sense that one is the "successor" of the other. They both do different things, and compliment each other. SWC is more lower-level, it's a compiler for JS (and other web tools) that converts your syntax into something any browser can understand. Turbopack is a bundler, it takes that compiled code and minifies/concatenates it together in various ways so it can be distributed to a browser efficiently. I believe Turbopack does in fact use SWC (if you're using Next that is) to do the "dirty" work of compiling TypeScript code into JavaScript quickly, but its main feature is the use of the Turbo engine to cache function calls at a very low level. From what I read, Turbopack's potential to make building JS apps incredibly efficient should be a really neat thing to work with in the future!
Ah gotcha, yeah I was always a bit confused about the whole thing but that makes sense. I've only used SWC directly as a WASM bundle to do in-browser realtime compilation and analysis of .tsx files, which works great, but that was pre-Vercel times when only 강동윤 was working on it.
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.