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by rob74 1201 days ago
I wonder how this compares (performance and feature-wise) to esbuild (https://github.com/evanw/esbuild), which is also a bundler written in a compiled language (Go)? esbuild claims to be 10-100x faster than JS-based builders, while Rspack doesn't provide any concrete numbers (at least I didn't find any)...
3 comments

This is a big difference though

> Rspack is compatible with webpack's configuration schema and loader architecture. You can seamlessly use familiar loaders such as babel-loader, less-loader, sass-loader, etc. Our long-term goal is to fully support most popular loaders including more complex cases such as vue-loader.

This depends of how many js hooks are used and how efficient they are. Large builds with many plugins / loaders have a parallelism bottleneck with native moving data back to JS.

The slower end, I’ve seen at least 5x improvement. Upper end, I’ve seen 30x. for a optimized prod build.

The project is quite new & fine tuning as it matures will most likely achieve further speed gains. The big benefit is you have a webpack level api & existing ecosystem support. Many current tools offer you speed in trade for api surface.

Smaller api & JS hooks, more speed. I’m not sure what the diff between them is. But a 20k cold dev build takes about 2 seconds. No incremental or lazy compilation is built in, in the initial release.

Rspack offers enormous real world build gains against webpack, while preserving its ecosystem which is a very welcome balance in speed vs power. As a big user & writer of custom plugins or complex builds, I’m not necessarily looking for the absolute fastest build. If a 40 second build takes 2, and esbuild takes 1 - its a negligible difference that I’d be happy to accept for a robust api.

At 50k modules, if a prod build taking ~15 seconds seems plenty fast - those represent some of the largest codebases.

> We have already used Rspack in internal projects and achieved a 5-10 times improvement in compilation performance.

Per their intro[0] page, I would recommend to read the entire intro page, it give some thought and brief comparison between webpack, vite, esbuild and turbopack.

[0] https://www.rspack.dev/guide/introduction.html#current-statu...