Web development: Next.js 15.3 drives the Bundler Turbopack forward
With the webpack successor Turbopack, alpha builds are now possible and the TypeScript language service plug-in has become faster and more reliable.
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The React framework Next.js has reached version 15.3. The development team at the manufacturer Vercel is once again working on Turbopack, which is intended to replace the established Bundler webpack as a faster successor. Version 15.3 also contains new navigation hooks and an update of the TypeScript language service plug-in.
Alpha builds with Turbopack
The new release includes the alpha version of next build --turbopack. Currently, 99.3 percent of the integration tests for next build are already running successfully, and interested parties can follow the progress via areweturboyet.com.
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The stable release of next dev --turbopack has been available since October 2024. According to the development team, if an application works with dev, it should also be suitable for build. build should also extend the local performance advantages to production environments. In the current alpha phase, however, use in production is not yet recommended: Developers should instead fall back to a preview or staging environment or run builds locally to investigate the differences in bundle size and performance.
One of the advantages of the Turbopack architecture compared to webpack is that the performance scales when CPU cores are added. Turbopack is said to be 28 percent faster with four cores, 60 percent faster with 16 cores and 83 percent faster with 30 cores.
More reliable TypeScript plug-in and new navigation hooks
In addition to the work on Turbopack, the Next.js team has dedicated itself to the TypeScript language server plug-in. In huge codebases, the plug-in could cause the TypeScript Language Service to crash. Performance updates should now make this a thing of the past, as internal tests have shown that plug-in response times have improved by around 60 percent and no freezes or crashes have occurred.
In addition, two navigation hooks have been added that affect the client-side routing capabilities of Next.js. The event handler onNavigate is a new property of the Link component and is executed during client-side navigations. It is used to enable precise control over the routing behavior of an application. The new client component hook useLinkStatus outputs a pending boolean value that indicates when a navigation is currently running and provides localized control over load states.
More information on these and other updates in Next.js 15.3 can be found on the Next.js blog.
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