Parcel joins the Church of Rust

Issue #392.May 13, 2025.2 Minute read.
Bytes

Today’s issue: Electron is better than you think, Skia upstages Apple, and refusing to use a JavaScript framework makes you better than other people.

Welcome to #392.

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The Main Thing

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Rust developers when their mom opens the blinds

Parcel joins the Church of Rust

Back in March, we wrote about how Parcel became the first non-framework tool to support React Server Components. And now, they’re chasing another hot trend with yesterday’s v2.15 release – rewriting in Rust.

But this isn’t a full baptism into the Church of High Performance and Anime Avatars. The Parcel team is merely dipping their toes in the Rust waters, but it’s already paying off with some big perf gains for the build tool.

Let’s take a closer look:

  • Rust-based HTML and SVG transformer – Thanks to the html5ever parser, Parcel’s transformer is now faster, more consolidated, and more spec-compliant. It even processes your inline <script> and <style> tags like a real browser, transforming and updating them during the build so you don’t have to babysit asset URLs.

  • SVGO is out, OXVG is in – Parcel replaced its old SVG optimizer with a new Rust-based one called OXVG that’s exponentially faster and more correct.

  • Import SVGs as JSX components – A new @parcel/transformer-svg-jsx plugin allows you to drop SVGs straight into your React components, without needing any wonky workarounds. This technically doesn’t have anything to do with Rust, but it’s still a nice upgrade.

The new Rust-based plugins shaved 45% off Parcel’s node_modules size and cut dependencies by 25% – which means faster installs and fewer packages to maintain.

Bottom Line: By now, we’re all smart enough to know that “rewriting the entire JavaScript toolchain in Rust” is a cry for help. But rewriting specific parts of the toolchain in a way that produces immediate perf gains is something I can get behind.

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Our Friends
(With Benefits)

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Vibe coders locking in

Chef is the AI agent for *actual* full-stack apps

Most AI coding tools can easily whip up a decent frontend, but the backend is always a janky hellscape major struggle.

That’s why Convex created Chef – an AI agent that turns your prompts into a production-ready app with a functional backend, database, auth, file storage, cron jobs, and a deployed frontend.

How tho? Because it’s built on Convex’s AI-optimized reactive database, where everything (frontend and backend) is written in pure TypeScript. This enables Chef to generate high-quality, type-safe code that works in one shot.

Here’s what else Chef gets you:

  • One-click deploys with a convex.app link

  • Built-in auth with zero config required

  • Beautiful dashboards for managing data, logs, and storage

Use it for free – and start building full-stack apps with a little self-respect.

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Cool Bits

  1. plainvanillaweb.com is an explainer on building websites using “only vanilla techniques” – no tools, no frameworks, and no fun allowed.

  2. Electron ain’t bad, actually is an article by Vaxry about their surprisingly positive experience using Electron to build a new minimalist music player called Vermilion.

  3. Datadog created this Front-end Developer Kit with a Best Practices Guide, a Solutions Brief, and a video training session that all share key methods for improving your front-end monitoring and testing setup. [sponsored]

  4. React Native Skia v2.0 just launched with an announcement video that has better production quality than any Apple product announcement in the past five years.

  5. VS Code just released v1.100, which is totally normal and not confusing or weird at all.

  6. Will McMullen wrote about how profiling provides code-level visibility into application execution, and why that’s helpful.

  7. Dan Abramov’s new Adderall patch still hasn’t worn off, and he’s back with another deep dive, this time about RSC for Astro developers.

  8. Michael Jackson just re-released UNPKG, a fast CDN for easily loading any file on npm using a URL.

  9. Kayce Basques wrote about how embeddings are underrated, so put some respect on their name.

  10. React Three is a collection of packages from the Poimandres team for helping you build 3D experiences with the @react-three/fiber ecosystem. But sadly, that ecosystem is being threatened by Colonel Miles Quaritch and the rest of the RDA who want to destroy the sacred trees of the Na’vi people for Unobtanium.