Large-scale AI migration is changing how we think about rewrites.
Looking back at Rspack, rewriting webpack in Rust was never just about translating code.
When we rewrote webpack in Rust, many of us were still learning Rust, webpack internals, or both. The project itself became a training ground.
People grew into experts. We re-examined webpack’s design choices. We found Rust-native implementations. We contributed back to projects like webpack core, plugins, NAPI, SWC and Lightning CSS.
The final result was not just “webpack in Rust”. It was a team, an ecosystem, and a new generation of bundler expertise.