Rust-Based Turbopack Targets Webpack’s Bottlenecks
Vercel has been systematically replacing JavaScript-based tooling in Next.js with Rust equivalents, a move that has already delivered major wins: a 17x faster transpilation after dropping Babel, and a 6x faster minification after swapping out Terser. The remaining constraint, says the company, is webpack — a bundler with over 3 billion downloads that remains central to web development but is now overdue for a speed upgrade.
That upgrade arrives in the form of Turbopack, a new high-performance bundler built for React Server Components and TypeScript codebases. The project is led by Tobias Koppers, the original creator of webpack, and is positioned as its Rust-based successor. The alpha is available now in Next.js 13 via next dev --turbo.
Incremental Architecture Drives the Speed Gains
Turbopack’s performance claims rest on its incremental design. The company reports that on large applications, updates are 700x faster than webpack in development. The bundler also minimizes the amount of code it processes during development, yielding fast startup times: booting an app with 5,000 modules takes about 4 seconds in Turbopack, versus roughly 16.6 seconds for Vite (with SWC).
The underlying framework is a new open-source Rust library called Turbo, which implements incremental memoization at the function level, a concept borrowed from tools like Turborepo and Google’s Bazel. Turbo caches the output of every function call; if a function’s inputs haven’t changed, the result is simply reused on subsequent runs. This granular caching lets the program skip significant chunks of work at the level of individual functions, rather than re-running entire build passes.
Roadmap: From Dev Server to Production
In its initial phase, Turbopack will drive the Next.js 13 development server, bringing fast hot module replacement (HMR) with native support for React Server Components, TypeScript, JSX, CSS, and other modern web primitives. Later, it will also handle Next.js production builds—both locally and in the cloud. Vercel plans to let teams share Turbopack’s cache across an entire organization by integrating with its Remote Caching service. Existing webpack users will also get an incremental migration path as the bundler matures.
The transition to Rust-based tooling in the Next.js ecosystem has already yielded measurable gains across transpilation and minification. With Turbopack now applying that same principle to bundling, the company is aiming to close out the last major performance gap in its development pipeline.
