Project
SWC is a Rust-based JavaScript/TypeScript compiler and toolchain, used by Next.js and Vite plugins as a faster alternative to Babel.
Miro moved 70,000 unit tests on its 6-million-line frontend from Jest to Vitest in two months, one of its engineers wrote. His figures for the old CI, six runners at up to 20 minutes a job, show what another team's test jobs would have to look like before the same switch pays off.
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Node.js marks type stripping Stable in versions 25.2 and 24.12, letting node script.ts run TypeScript without ts-node, tsx or a build step. Node only deletes types, so the switch holds for code that stays inside TypeScript's erasable subset.
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Running .ts files directly drops tsx and the dist folder, and because the stripper blanks annotations in place instead of deleting them, stack traces stay accurate without a source map. Node still never opens tsconfig.json.
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A dev.to write-up traces a failed Hostinger deploy of Next.js 16.3.5 to SWC's native bindings. The fix was an .mjs config file and a --webpack flag on the build script, both committed to the repo, with nothing changed on the host.
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SWC's creator fanned a single instruction out to 45 concurrent Labor0 tasks on the ES minifier, then kept review and merge for himself. He says he does not know how long the run took; he was looking at his phone.
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The Rust rewrite keeps pnpm 11's commands and lockfile, so adopting it costs little more than pulling from the next-12 tag, but the headline percentage describes a 1.5-second install and the cold case improved by about two thirds.
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A three-project diff published on dev.to shows Next.js 16's SWC sorting browserslist into two buckets, so chrome 116 and chrome 139 compile identically, while the ie 11 build downlevels syntax and still calls Object.hasOwn.
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The Vite config came to 23 lines. The merge request came to 166 files and 70 days, nearly all of it paying down what Create React App had been quietly supplying.
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