SWC (Speedy Web Compiler) is a Rust-based platform for JavaScript and TypeScript compilation that set out to replace Babel. Where Babel transforms modern JavaScript into backward-compatible code using a JavaScript-based pipeline, SWC does the same work in Rust — and finishes 20 to 70 times faster on typical projects. For large codebases where Babel adds minutes to build times, SWC cuts that to seconds.
The project covers transpilation, minification, and bundling. SWC handles JSX, TypeScript, decorator syntax, and all the modern JavaScript features that Babel plugins traditionally transform. It also includes a minifier that competes with Terser’s output quality at dramatically higher speed. The tool exposes both a Rust API and a Node.js binding (via napi-rs), making it a drop-in replacement in existing JavaScript toolchains.
SWC’s adoption happened quickly because major frameworks embedded it. Next.js switched from Babel to SWC as its default compiler starting with version 12, which alone put SWC in front of millions of developers. Deno uses SWC for TypeScript compilation. Parcel 2 uses SWC for JavaScript transformation. Vercel hired SWC creator Donny (kdy1) and invested in the project, which now also powers Turbopack — Vercel’s Webpack successor. The project is open-source with around 30,000 GitHub stars and maintained by a small core team. SWC proved the same lesson as esbuild: rewriting JavaScript tooling in a systems language delivers order-of-magnitude performance gains that compound across every build, CI run, and deployment pipeline.
