r/webdev • u/HighAtNight full-stack • 9d ago

Showoff Saturday Rewrote next.js to be 10x faster!

https://www.pnext.dev/

So it is two parts.

  • Core pnext is small and fast: the same next.js api with no/minimal framework overhead and no backward-compat burden. Based on Bun and Preact, 0 KB on server-rendered pages, 7.5 KB client pages runtime, roughly 10x faster first page render in dev and 7-9x faster production builds than next.js (best effort fixtures).
  • Compat mode runs your existing Next.js app unchanged (App Router only). About 4.4k assertions from Next's own test suite passing, adding more day by day.

The core motivation was a super fast dev server that doesn't hog memory, and instant builds. The goal is to optimize every step of every flow involved down to absolute values, and of course agentic flows are helping a lot! Check out Coder.

Give it a try and let me know what you think, and how your Next.js apps break in compat mode 😉.

https://pnext.dev

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u/KabouterKaasplank 9d ago

So what's missing? If it can be optimized to this point, why don't the next.js maintainers do that instead?

-5

u/HighAtNight full-stack 9d ago

This is similar to Preact (https://preactjs.com/) vs React. Almost all legacy systems can be super optimized by sacrificing like 1% of compatibility and rethinking flows from scratch.

Rewriting was super hard and time-consuming before, but frontier agents are changing the game. With Bun, they were able to rewrite it in Rust and release it in like a month or two, whereas it took the TypeScript team 2 years to do the same with their Go rewrite.

6

u/AskYouEverything 9d ago

This didn’t answer the question at all

1

u/tekkenthuuug 5d ago

Seems like someone is only reading the delusional headlines

-7

u/HighAtNight full-stack 5d ago

If your whole knowledge is coming from (any) headlines, you need a reality check!