4 ms·

Vercel is on a streak. I am curious whether Turbopack elapses Vite like Vite elapsed Webpack over the past 12 months.

hmillison 4y ago
according to the article, Turbopack is 10-20x faster than Vite. I wonder how they were able to edge it out so significantly!
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Rust is a hell of a drug.
- maxfurman 4y ago
  My guess is some combination of dropping support for older browsers, supporting fewer features, and optimizing for the common case at the expense of edge cases. In a few releases, once all those are added back in, it will be no faster than Vite.
- brundolf 4y ago
  I would guess they're factoring this in: > Turbopack is built on Turbo: an open-source, incremental memoization framework for Rust. Turbo can cache the result of any function in the program. When the program is run again, functions won't re-run unless their inputs have changed. This granular architecture enables your program to skip large amounts of work, at the level of the function. Which would make that multiple an extremely rough estimate, highly-dependent on the situation. But it's still an exciting development
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I wonder how they make that robust, given that Rust isn't pure and there's no way to force a function to be pure either.
    - brundolf 4y ago
      It's not very hard to stick to a pure-ish style even in languages that don't statically enforce it; JavaScript's MobX framework has the same constraint, as do React functions, and computed properties in Vue, etc. You don't really get any static help with functional purity in those cases, but thousands of programmers do it successfully every day And while Rust doesn't strictly enforce purity, it does make it a lot easier to stick to in practice with its explicit `mut` keyword for local variables, references, and function arguments (including for the `self` argument on methods). There are various ways like RefCell to get around this if you're really trying to, but you have to go out of your way.
- fabian2k 4y ago
  The answer seems to be caching (https://turbo.build/pack/docs/core-concepts https://turbo.build/pack/docs/core-concepts), lots and lots of caching. Which enables it to reuse a lot of already computed stuff for incremental rebuilds.
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    Which makes me wonder if the speed comparison graphics are solely about repeat builds.
- atfzl 4y ago
  Vite uses esbuild for transpiling and rollup for bundling. esbuild (written in go) is already pretty fast for transpiling but there might be a lot of possibilities to optimize in rollup as rollup is written in JavaScript.
  - FractalHQ 4y ago
    Coincidentally, the primary maintainer of Rollup mentioned plans for a rust rewrite in his recent talk at Vite Conf.
- hardwaregeek 4y ago
  Incremental compilation plus not having each dependency be its own network request (I work on Turbo, but not Turbopack).
vidyesh 4y ago
It is still in alpha, I am guessing a lot of backward compatibility might still be added to it before the stable release. And the article exclusively testing it against just Next.js build could be an indicator as of how optimized it is for the meta framework probably?
JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
If the configuration is a nightmare like webpack then not likely.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Webpack has a reputation that was deserved in early versions. More recently it's not so bad unless you have very specific needs. If all you're doing is building a standard app from things like JS or TS, a CSS processor, and maybe a framework you probably won't need more than half a dozen lines of config that you can paste from Webpack or your framework's docs.
  - jscheel 4y ago
    Currently looking at a 1000 line webpack config..........
    - onion2k 4y ago
      You're either doing something complicated or you're not using Webpack very well. Most Webpack config I've worked with isn't like that.
      - jscheel 4y ago
        It's justifiable for the level of complexity it is handling, but it does mean that trying to switch to a different build process is gonna be painful.
    - meowtimemania 4y ago
      What does your 1000 line webpack config do?? I think part of the problem with webpack is it gives users the freedom to create 1000 line configs even though they’d be fine with a smaller more simple config
      - wellanyway 4y ago
        Problem with webpack is that freeform JS code is not "configuaration". Configuration presumes set amount of features driven by declarative statement. Most of what I've seen done "in Webpack" in fact is shitty scripting in an awful language. I'm very happy to see movement away from this criminal waste of everyone's time.

according to the article, Turbopack is 10-20x faster than Vite. I wonder how they were able to edge it out so significantly!

minimaxir 4y ago
Rust is a hell of a drug.
maxfurman 4y ago
My guess is some combination of dropping support for older browsers, supporting fewer features, and optimizing for the common case at the expense of edge cases. In a few releases, once all those are added back in, it will be no faster than Vite.
brundolf 4y ago
I would guess they're factoring this in: > Turbopack is built on Turbo: an open-source, incremental memoization framework for Rust. Turbo can cache the result of any function in the program. When the program is run again, functions won't re-run unless their inputs have changed. This granular architecture enables your program to skip large amounts of work, at the level of the function. Which would make that multiple an extremely rough estimate, highly-dependent on the situation. But it's still an exciting development
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I wonder how they make that robust, given that Rust isn't pure and there's no way to force a function to be pure either.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    It's not very hard to stick to a pure-ish style even in languages that don't statically enforce it; JavaScript's MobX framework has the same constraint, as do React functions, and computed properties in Vue, etc. You don't really get any static help with functional purity in those cases, but thousands of programmers do it successfully every day And while Rust doesn't strictly enforce purity, it does make it a lot easier to stick to in practice with its explicit `mut` keyword for local variables, references, and function arguments (including for the `self` argument on methods). There are various ways like RefCell to get around this if you're really trying to, but you have to go out of your way.
fabian2k 4y ago
The answer seems to be caching (https://turbo.build/pack/docs/core-concepts https://turbo.build/pack/docs/core-concepts), lots and lots of caching. Which enables it to reuse a lot of already computed stuff for incremental rebuilds.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Which makes me wonder if the speed comparison graphics are solely about repeat builds.
atfzl 4y ago
Vite uses esbuild for transpiling and rollup for bundling. esbuild (written in go) is already pretty fast for transpiling but there might be a lot of possibilities to optimize in rollup as rollup is written in JavaScript.
- FractalHQ 4y ago
  Coincidentally, the primary maintainer of Rollup mentioned plans for a rust rewrite in his recent talk at Vite Conf.
hardwaregeek 4y ago
Incremental compilation plus not having each dependency be its own network request (I work on Turbo, but not Turbopack).

vidyesh 4y ago

It is still in alpha, I am guessing a lot of backward compatibility might still be added to it before the stable release. And the article exclusively testing it against just Next.js build could be an indicator as of how optimized it is for the meta framework probably?

JoshGlazebrook 4y ago

If the configuration is a nightmare like webpack then not likely.

onion2k 4y ago
Webpack has a reputation that was deserved in early versions. More recently it's not so bad unless you have very specific needs. If all you're doing is building a standard app from things like JS or TS, a CSS processor, and maybe a framework you probably won't need more than half a dozen lines of config that you can paste from Webpack or your framework's docs.
- jscheel 4y ago
  Currently looking at a 1000 line webpack config..........
  - onion2k 4y ago
    You're either doing something complicated or you're not using Webpack very well. Most Webpack config I've worked with isn't like that.
    - jscheel 4y ago
      It's justifiable for the level of complexity it is handling, but it does mean that trying to switch to a different build process is gonna be painful.
  - meowtimemania 4y ago
    What does your 1000 line webpack config do?? I think part of the problem with webpack is it gives users the freedom to create 1000 line configs even though they’d be fine with a smaller more simple config
    - wellanyway 4y ago
      Problem with webpack is that freeform JS code is not "configuaration". Configuration presumes set amount of features driven by declarative statement. Most of what I've seen done "in Webpack" in fact is shitty scripting in an awful language. I'm very happy to see movement away from this criminal waste of everyone's time.