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Why is the frontend infrastructure migrating from JS to Go and Rust?
The tools that build JavaScript are no longer written in JavaScript, and if you a tech nerd you already know what I am saying. Every month some frontend tooling gets migrated from JavaScript to either Go or Rust. The bundler inside Vite is now Rust, the bundler inside Next.js is now Rust, and since TypeScript 7 the TypeScript compiler itself is Go. For a decade the frontend ecosystem built its own tools in its own language, and now, one tool at a time, it is moving them out.
So the question here is a simple one. What is it about the job of a build tool that JavaScript stopped being able to do, and what do Rust and Go do differently?
Before asking why, how many tools have actually made this move?
Which Tools Have Already Moved?
More than it first seems. Each name below comes with what the tool does, since the list only means something once we know each tool’s job.
- esbuild (Go). A bundler, the tool that follows every
importin a project and merges the files into a few the browser can load. Released around 2020, it was the first tool to show how wide the gap between JavaScript and native tooling was. - SWC (Rust). A transpiler, which converts TypeScript and JSX into plain JavaScript. It…
