You know. This thing is created by the creator of webpack. The site looks very polished. His name, photo, and fancy autograph is there. Seems there's too much ego involved in this project.
I tend not to trust architecture / quality / performance of people who made my programming life worse. :)
I get a lot of deno feels here. I'll just be happy with esbuild.
I'm a huge fan of esbuild. Whether it's 'the best' at everything or not, our build process is now so simple I can understand it with barely any effort. Webpacker never gave me that confidence.
Not mentioning speed at all here, it was never my biggest concern.
This is using swc under the hood which as a transpiler is usually slower than esbuild. What makes Turbopack faster is caching not the transpiler. Rails (or vite or whoever) can implement similar caching speeding things up as well.
Why I wouldn’t choose, esbuild is because they don’t support the automatic React runtime and don’t seem to have plans to (or at least last time I checked.) Swc does… So as long as you’re okay with that limitation I imagine you’re probably fine.
You could also potentially use Bazel for remote caching in your rails app, though I haven’t used it myself so I don’t know how well it would work.
esbuild remains a fantastic, stable, well documented choice. It does one thing, and does it very well, and is well beyond "version 1.0" quality software.
Comparing an alpha just open-sourced today to an established tool like esbuild isn't even a fair comparison, for either tool.
The Rails https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails gem lets you pick between esbuild, rollup and Webpack. If Turbopack ends up being popular then jsbundling should be able to support it.
The nice thing about Rails now is there's no massive direct integration like Webpacker once was. Now we can basically use the JS tool straight up and Rails will just look at assets in a specific directory, it doesn't matter what tool generated it.
