Bytes 481: Rspack 2.0, Fresh ships zero JS, and async pays its tab
Published on 28.04.2026
Rspack 2.0 stops being "a faster webpack"
TLDR: Rspack 2.0 ships, drops the "we are webpack but in Rust" pitch, and starts adding modern build defaults including pure ESM, smarter tree shaking, and first-class agent support.
Fresh 2.3 ships zero JavaScript by default, for real
TLDR: Deno's Fresh 2.3 finally lives up to the no-JS promise it has been making since launch, adds View Transitions, ships first-class WebSockets, and threads OpenTelemetry from server to browser.
The end of responsive images, finally
TLDR: Mat Marquis, who chaired the responsive images working group, confesses he hated sizes the whole time, and explains how sizes="auto" plus loading="lazy" finally lets the browser figure it out for you.
The end of responsive images by Mat Marquis
VoidZero rewrites the Angular compiler in Rust, with AI
TLDR: VoidZero shipped an experimental Oxc-based Angular compiler that runs roughly twenty times faster than @ngtools/webpack on Bitwarden, written in Rust over two months in collaboration with Claude Code and Codex.
How we made the Angular Compiler faster using AI
What async promised and what it delivered
TLDR: Josh Segall traces the callbacks-to-promises-to-async/await arc as a fifteen year accumulation of taxes, and argues each wave fixed local ergonomics while making the global picture worse.
What Async Promised and What it Delivered
A four line patch that should have been there from day one
TLDR: A 2017 Scratch SVG renderer commit added a regex to strip <script> tags from user-uploaded SVGs, plus a single test, and serves as a tidy reminder that SVG sanitization is non-optional.