Ready to optimize your JavaScript with Rust? (Ep. 517)
On today’s episode, we’re airing a conversation recorded at the Next.JS conference. We chat with Lee Robinson, VP of Developer Experience at Vercel about the company’s vision for evolving from Webpack to Turbopack, helping customers who are cautious about migrating to a new tool, changes happening with React server components, and much more.
EPISODE NOTES
Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alpha and experimental release.
We go over the routing and rendering updates in Next.JS 13, exploring where it might offer developers more flexibility and the ability to use React server components to ship less, maybe a lot less, JavaScript. As Lee says in the episode:
“So to your point about wanting to ship less JavaScript, that was a kinda fundamental architectural decision of where we headed with the app directory. And the core of this is because it’s built on React server components.
The key thing with React server components is that as your application grows in size from one component to a hundred thousand components, the amount of client-side JavaScript you send can be exactly the same. It can be constant because you can render every single component on the server.
And that’s a lot different from the world of React applications today, where every new component you add for data fetching or just putting some HTML on the screen also adds additional client-side JavaScript.
So this is kind of inverting the default, back from the client to be server first. Now, of course, we still love client-side interactivity that React provides making really interactive and rich UI experiences, but the default for data fetching or just getting HTML to the browser happens from the server, and that’s gonna help us reduce the amount of JavaScript.”
You can learn more about Lee on his website, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To diver deeper into his take on how Rust will impact the future of Javascript, check out a post he wrote here.
Tags: the stack overflow podcast
5 Comments
Hi Ben!
I’m a junior developer and I really enjoy listening to the show, but I have to admit that most of the content blows over my head in terms of understanding.
I was hoping that perhaps the way you bring your content across can be discussed and explained a little more in depth. Not sure if that’s the correct way to go about it but ultimately what I’m asking is for it to speak a little to Junior devs too.
All the best!
so now we’re going to server-side rendering because Javascript has grown too large on the client? Interesting. We’ve come full circle back to 2005 feels like.
It’s all your, test or interview, I’m sorry I actings, I simply making, time pass, plz don’t wast your time
You people are absurd with your ridiculous fumblings in the name of “progress.”
Rust is not going to compile with the remainder of the mech core platform that file checks and core mega’X with the newly fashioned kotlin& yarn that was ssh and sso with windows and ms.dev off GitHub. But Incase you are absolutely in love w JS you can always just use Gradle and probably Mavin coming soon. Till then enjoy the stand alone.
WmHC