Rust Is Eating JavaScript

Rust has steadily taken over JavaScript's build toolchain. Starting with SWC replacing Babel and Terser in Next.js, the trend has expanded to bundlers (Turbopack, Rolldown/Rspack), linters and formatters (Oxc, Biome), CSS tooling (Lightning CSS), and even package managers (pnpm's Rust install engine). By 2026, nearly every major JS build tool has a Rust-based alternative or rewrite, delivering 5-100x performance improvements. VoidZero (Evan You's Rust toolchain company) was acquired by Cloudflare, Bun rewrote its core from Zig to Rust using AI coding agents, and the pattern has spread to Python tooling (uv, Ruff). The post also notes Rust's suitability for AI-generated code due to its strict compiler.