At the NextJS conference there were a lot of really exciting things that were announced, while a lot of the new functionality centered around Vercel-centric offerings which will greatly improve the developer experience and performance there was one new project that was talked about a good amount and that was Turbopack. Created by Tobias and the team at Vercel, Turbopack was advertised as the “next evolution of Webpack” and the “Twilight of Webpack”, the conversations in Discord during the presentation bounced between “Webpack Killer” and the more cautionary “This is still alpha should we use it”, which seems about on par with what to expect from developers seeing a new shiny tool.

This post is not intended to detract from anything the Vercel / Next team is doing with Turbopack, nor detract from the Next.js conference itself. A conference that had one of the best overall event production and fluidity I’ve seen outside of Apple events.

During her conference presentation on stage J, Maia Tegarden shared that Turbo is 700x faster than Webpack and 10x faster than Vite, the main differences being the advanced caching mechanisms and the build platform moving to Rust. There was one large comparison that I believe the presentation left out, most likely intentionally, comparing Tunrbopack to Webpack with Nx. Nx has its own caching mechanisms both locally and in the cloud (which organizationally would be more beneficial for enterprises with heavily distributed teams).

In order to do some testing and benchmarking, I decided to follow the guide on starting a project with turbo. Luckily the Vercel team makes it super easy to get started.

Turbopack looks promising but still has some room for improvement from a performance standpoint. I’d love to see what is coming with the next version of Nx and the updates made to better support Next 13. However, outside of the initial startup, the actual development activity and JIT updates appears to be faster with Webpack and Nx than with Turbopack.

Because Nx also can leverage multiple builders, including esbuild, I’d also be interested to see Nx working directly with Turbopack itself and how to replace the local cache being used by Turbopack with the cloud cache from Nx.

*no compile events were reported, however that does not mean none were potentially executed due to possibly being swallowed by Nx
note: these tests were all performed on a 16” MBP with a M1 Max and 64 GB memory