Rspack just released version 1.0 , and the dream of using Rust-based build tools to speed up the JavaScript ecosystem is more alive than ever. How did we get here? Early last year, a team of developers at ByteDance was facing performance issues maintaining the company’s “many large monolithic applications.” So they did what any good developer would do: they blamed webpack. But they didn’t stop there. In March 2023, they released Rspack v0.1, a high-performance JavaScript bundler written in Rust and designed to be fully compatible with the webpack ecosystem.

Fast forward to today, and Rspack now has 100k weekly downloads and has introduced key improvements that make it production-ready:

• Better performance: New features like lazy compilation and other performance optimizations make Rspack 1.0 build times over 20x faster than webpack 5.
• Increased webpack compatibility: Over 80% of the top 50 downloaded webpack plugins can now be used in Rspack, bringing it closer to becoming a true drop-in replacement for webpack.
• Reduced complexity: They created a new toolchain called Rstack that includes separate projects like Rsbuild, Rspress, and Rslib, each targeting different use cases. This reduces the complexity of setting up an all-in-one tool like Rspack (or webpack), while still maintaining flexibility.

Bottom line: Rspack offers a pretty simple value proposition for developers: if you already use webpack, it will make it much easier for you to migrate to its bundler which is faster, easier to use, and still fully compatible with the webpack API. Time will tell if that will be enough to convince the masses to try it out.