2 posts tagged with "rust"

OJ — nicknamed "Orange Juice" — is a single Rust binary from Lovable that runs a React app the way Vite's dev server does. To be clear up front, because this is where most of the coverage goes wrong: it is not a fork of Vite's source code, and it is not a full rewrite of Vite. It reimplements one layer — the dev-server layer — in Rust, while leaning on the same Rust foundations Vite itself already uses. That correction matters, but it isn't the real story. The real story is the debate OJ set off: a Socket.dev article and a widely-shared Evan You post arguing that AI is collapsing the cost of reimplementing open-source dependencies, and what that does to the ecosystem. If you want the background on why Rust keeps showing up under node_modules, that's a separate post — see The Rust Wave Under Your node_modules. This one is about OJ specifically, and the argument it started.

In January 2020, esbuild 0.1 dropped and gave the JavaScript ecosystem its first taste of what esbuild's own FAQ described as 10–100× faster tooling. The shock was real, but the lasting shift wasn't actually Go. By 2021 the new tools coming out — SWC, Turbopack, Rspack, Biome, oxc, Rolldown, Lightning CSS, plus runtimes like Deno and desktop shells like Tauri — were almost uniformly Rust. Six years later, on a modern frontend project, a non-trivial fraction of what lands in node_modules after npm install is a Rust binary in a thin JavaScript wrapper. This post is a curiosity tour of that landscape: who built what, in what order, and how the Rust pieces actually get into the install. It is not a recommendation post; there is no switch-to-X conclusion at the end.