Webpack creator Tobias Koppers announcing its (Vercel-funded) successor:

Turbopack is built on a new incremental architecture for the fastest possible development experience. On large applications, it shows updates 10x faster than Vite and 700x faster than Webpack. On even larger applications, the difference is greater—often 20x faster than Vite.

Turbopack is open source and still in alpha. Here’s what the future may hold:

To start, Turbopack will be used for the Next.js 13 development server. It will power lightning-fast HMR, and it will support React Server Components natively, as well as TypeScript, JSX, CSS, and more.

Turbopack will eventually also power Next.js production builds, both locally and in the cloud. We’ll be able to share Turbo’s cache across your entire team, using Vercel Remote Caching.

Webpack users can also expect an incremental migration path into the Rust-based future with Turbopack.

We sit down with Tobias Koppers of webpack fame to talk about his life as a full-time maintainer of one of the most highly used (4 million+ dependent repos!) and influential tools in all of the web.

Things we ask Tobias include: how he got here, how he pays himself, has he ever gotten a raise, what his typical day is like, how he decides what to work on, if he pays attention to the competition, and if he’s ever suffered from burnout.