Parcel's Big Rust Wave

Today’s issue: Deleting tweets twice as fast, big news for my Sora followers, and a touching Node.js Veterans Day tribute.

Welcome to #536.

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Parcel’s Big Rust Wave

Every JavaScript build tool eventually goes through the same five stages of grief: denial, benchmarks, bargaining, porting a couple modules to Rust, and finally accepting that Node is the problem.

Parcel just hit stage five. The Parcel 3 alpha came out this week, and it’s a ground-up Rust rewrite with “no dependency on Node at all.” The CLI, dev server, transformers, bundler, and optimizers all live in a single binary under 30 MB, which is down from a ~120 MB install for v2 and hundreds of npm dependencies.

Devon Govett and the Parcel team have been Rust-curious for a while now with Lightning CSS and building on SWC, but they’re finally going full Rust for two reasons: 1) Parcel’s JavaScript core was always limited by its inability to share memory across threads, and 2) AI is very good at writing painfully tedious Rust code.

Here’s what Parcel’s big rewrite gets you:

• Up to 100x faster cold builds. React Spectrum’s docs site went from 87.6s to 810ms, and memory usage fell 2.5x to 6.6x across their benchmarks.

• No more disk caching. Caching makes sense when the underlying work is slow. When it’s fast, the invalidation tracking becomes the bottleneck and a bug factory. v3 keeps in-memory rebuilds and otherwise just rebuilds from scratch.

• Plugins are native now. It exposes a stable C interface, so you can write plugins in Rust, Go, or Swift. And simple JS/TS plugins run in an embedded QuickJS runtime.

Bottom Line: Parcel is arguing that once cold builds are fast enough, most of the complexity we’ve piled onto bundlers (cache layers, invalidation tracking, massive plugin ecosystems) stops being worth it. If they’re right, Vite and Rspack might have a very loud new neighbor in the build tool thunderdome.

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class Queue {
  constructor() {
    this.list = [];
    this.length = 0;
  }

  enqueue(value) {
    this.length++;
    this.list.push(value);
  }

  dequeue() {
    if (this.length === 0) return;
    this.length--;
    return this.list.shift();
  }

  peek() {
    return this.list[this.list.length - 1];
  }
}

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1. Principal Engineer, Yagiz Nizipli wrote an interesting technical post on how his team rebuilt X.com to improve performance. It should enable his boss to delete old tweets twice as fast.

2. Google’s Custom Search JSON API shuts down on January 1, 2027. Point your app or AI agent at Apify Web Search to keep getting Google results as JSON. Use code BYTES for $25 in credits. [sponsored]

3. Ink is a small, typed language with locally checked proofs and an extensible optimization database.

4. Node.js announced security releases for the 22, 24, and 26 lines landing November 11, with the highest severity rated HIGH and the details embargoed until then. They scheduled it for Veterans Day so we could all experience the fog of war firsthand.

5. Congrats, your AI agent writes code 10x faster. Now you just review it 10x slower – which is why teams at Dropbox, Wiz and ElevenLabs use Meticulous to verify every user flow and edge case. There’s no developer effort, so they can get back to actual engineering. [sponsored]

6. The Chrome team just shipped the HTML-in-Canvas API in Chrome 157, so you can finally render real, accessible DOM elements inside a <canvas>.

7. Remix v3.2 just dropped with Content Security Policy support, ~10% smaller component runtime, and other goodies. Quick question, is this Remix-the-framework, Remix-the-React-Router-wrapper, or Remix-the-state-of-mind?

8. Socket published this guide to hardening GitHub Actions against outside threats.

9. Blacksmith is a drop-in replacement for GitHub runners that’s significantly faster and costs 60% less. It’s dead simple and also fully observable in your CI pipeline. [sponsored]

10. OpenAI is acquiring Pierre, the startup behind Code Storage and the Trees and Diffs libraries that Codex already uses, which means OpenAI now wants to write your code, store your code, and review your code. I really should’ve gone to that Twinks of SF meetup back in 2014 when I had the chance.

11. BUI is an open-source library that extracts Blender’s entire UI so you can use it from Python, Rust, JavaScript, C, or C++. Finally, your CRUD app can feel exactly like hour 40 of the donut tutorial.

12. Google just released Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash for native 15-second video creation, which is gonna be transformational for my Sora followers.

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A queue is first in, first out, so peek() should return the first item, not the last.

class Queue {
  constructor() {
    this.list = [];
    this.length = 0;
  }

  enqueue(value) {
    this.length++;
    this.list.push(value);
  }

  dequeue() {
    if (this.length === 0) return;
    this.length--;
    return this.list.shift();
  }

  peek() {
    return this.list[0];
  }
}