Building applications for the web has evolved over the years. With new technologies and frameworks promising different things, browsers have also gotten smarter. Across board, we still prioritize creating a fast, seamless and accessible experience for users. This talk will be focused on simplifying some of the steps we can start practicing, to optimize for performance in web applications.

If you write JS or TS, probably every tool you use daily is currently being rewritten in Rust.

This has advantages (have you heard that Rust is "blazing fast"?), but also potential downsides.

The evolution of JS from the dark days before async/await was fuelled by tooling written in JS. If our tools migrate to a language we don't know, will we lose the ability to control or customize them?

In this talk, I'll explain how in Oxc (the compiler underlying the next generation of the open source Vite bundler), we're trying to "square the circle" - providing rich customisation via plugins written in JS, but maintaining the exceptional performance of Rust - and take you into the nerdy details of memory layouts, allocators, garbage collection, and the tricks that make it possible to have our Rusty cake and eat it with a JS fork.