Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
The Rust Wave and the 2025–2026 Release Map: Rolldown, Oxc, Rspack, Turbopack, Lightning CSS and Choosing a Tool
In 2025–2026 build tools written in JavaScript were replaced by ones written in Rust and Go: Vite 8 moved to Rolldown and Oxc, the Angular CLI to Rolldown for chunk optimization, Next.js 16 to Turbopack, and Rspack 2.0 offered a webpack-compatible path. Measuring the Bookstore widget with four tools, we see Rspack ahead on the small project, Rolldown and esbuild ahead at 2000 modules, most of webpack's time spent in Terser, and we end with a decision table.
The Angular CLI Build System: the application Builder, esbuild + Vite, the Move to Rolldown and Migrating from webpack
The Angular CLI's application builder bundles the app with esbuild, reorganizes the chunks with Rolldown once the number of lazy chunks passes a threshold, and uses Vite only as the dev server. Migrating Bookstore's Angular app from the webpack-based browser builder, we look at the output moving into a browser folder, a main bundle cut in half because of moment's locale files, the limits of HMR, the define and loader options, the Baseline browser target and the TypeScript 6.0 requirement.
Vite: The Native ESM Dev Server, HMR, Dependency Pre-bundling and Production Builds with Rolldown
In development Vite does not bundle source code: it transforms each file on request, serves it as native ESM and pre-bundles dependencies once; in production Vite 8 uses Rolldown, Oxc and Lightning CSS. Connecting the Bookstore widget to ASP.NET Core, we look at the /api proxy, when HMR reloads the page, a Razor tag helper that reads manifest.json, how VITE_ variables end up in the bundle, and settings that silently stop working when migrating from Vite 7.