React Framework Next.js 16 Makes Turbopack the Default Bundler

The company Vercel has released Next.js 16. A lot has happened in the React framework: the faster webpack successor Turbopack is now available in stable status and is used as the default bundler, React compiler support is also stable, and there are new features for caching, routing, and integration with the Model Context Protocol, among others.

JavaScript Conference: Ideas Wanted

Call for Proposals for enterJS 2026 on June 16 and 17 in Mannheim: The organizers are looking for talks and workshops on JavaScript and TypeScript, frameworks, tools and libraries, security, UX, and more. Discounted blind bird tickets are available until the program starts.

Stable Features: Turbopack and React Compiler Support

Turbopack has reached stable status for both development and production builds. As the default bundler for all apps, Turbopack is intended to enable up to ten times faster Fast Refresh and two to five times faster builds.

No further configuration is required in Next.js 16 to use Turbopack. In apps with custom webpack setups, developers can continue to use the older bundler:

next dev --webpack
next build --webpack

Turbopack also offers a new feature that is already in use in all internal Vercel apps: the bundler supports file system caching during development as a beta. It caches compiler artifacts between executions to achieve significantly faster compile times on restarts - especially in large projects. The beta feature can be enabled in the configuration:

const nextConfig = {
  experimental: {
    turbopackFileSystemCacheForDev: true,
  },
};
 
export default nextConfig;

At the beginning of the month, the React Compiler 1.0 was released, and Next.js 16 offers integrated support for it - now in stable status. However, support is disabled by default as the Next.js team is still collecting further data. Developers who activate the option must apparently expect longer compilation times in development and builds because the React Compiler uses Babel.

New Features for MCP and Caching

In addition to stabilizing features, Next.js 16 offers further innovations. These include Next.js DevTools MCP, an integration with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI-assisted debugging with context insights into a Next.js application. Also new are the Cache Components, a set of features to make caching in Next.js more explicit and flexible. They introduce the new "use cache" directive, which allows pages, components, and functions to be cached.

Read also

Open Source: New React Foundation under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation

The Next.js team goes into details about these and other features in version 16 in a blog post explains in a blog post.

(mai)