Next.js: Turbopack's Push Toward WebAssembly

A cluster of PRs from Tobias Koppers systematically prepares Turbopack's Rust core to compile and run on WebAssembly targets, while a separate wave of fixes tightens filesystem and resolution correctness in Turbopack. Both threads point to the same goal: a more portable, more correct bundler ahead of wider platform support.

Duration: PT2M30S

Episode overview

This episode is a short developer briefing from Next.js.

It explains recent repository work in plain language.

  • Show: Next.js
  • Published: 2026-08-26T13:11:46Z
  • Audio duration: PT2M30S

Transcript excerpt

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Good morning. It's August 26th, and today's codebase activity tells one dominant story: getting Turbopack ready to run on WebAssembly.

At least six merged PRs form a deliberate stack toward that goal. Tobias Koppers made the SWC plugin backend native-only in PR ninety-seven eight five seven, stubbed out HTTP support for wasm targets in PR ninety-seven five eight five since the networking library reqwest can't run there safely, disabled SWC's plugin…

The second theme is resolution correctness. PR ninety-seven seven nine nine fixes a long-standing mislabeling: slash-rooted imports now resolve from the project directory instead of the filesystem root, closing a real security and correctness gap in monorepos. PR ninety-seven eight two five fixes symlink resolution…

Smaller but notable: a persistence layer series from Koppers is adding an opt-out for memory-mapped I/O across three dependent PRs, useful for environments with constrained virtual memory. And Luke Sandberg's parent-count reference counting, PR nine five nine seven six, gives the backend instant reachability…

What's next: expect the wasm stack to keep growing, and watch for the re-export deadlock fix to land after three…

That's…

Nearby episodes from Next.js

  1. WebAssembly Cleanup and Cache Correctness Fixes
  2. Cutting the Route Table Down to Size
  3. Weekly Recap - Slimming Down the Build Output and the Dev Server
  4. Tightening Up Static Rendering Edges
  5. Partial Prefetching Precedence Gets Cleaned Up
  6. Module Federation Lands in Turbopack, Partial Prefetching Gains New APIs
  7. Cleaning Up Test Debt and Prefetch Bugs
  8. Development Caching Comes Full Circle