Oxc nears Rust port of React Compiler, merge planned soon

A Rust rewrite of React Compiler is moving out of the lab and into the part of the toolchain that frontend teams actually feel every day: local builds, editor feedback, and the endless grind of keeping Babel out of the critical path. Oxc says the port is ready for merge in the coming weeks, local testing is already available, and a draft integration pull request is in progress for wider ecosystem use.

That matters because React Compiler is not a vanity optimization pass. React describes it as a compiler that keeps only the minimal parts of components and hooks re-rendering when state changes, while also checking that components and hooks follow the Rules of React. React shipped Compiler 1.0 on October 7, 2025, and paired it with compiler-powered lint rules in the recommended and recommended-latest presets for eslint-plugin-react-hooks. The company also lined up Expo, Vite, and Next.js for new-app adoption, a strong signal that this is meant to become normal React plumbing, not a niche experiment.

The Rust port is happening in parallel with work in the React repo to align behavior across SWC and Oxc. Recent merges in the rust-compiler track documented the remaining end-to-end parity TODOs, injected CLI filenames into PluginOptions for both SWC and Oxc, and handled source-location, comments, and TypeScript edge cases. That is the important detail hidden inside the parity talk: the effort is no longer just about getting something to compile, but about making sure the Rust implementation behaves like the JavaScript version in the messy corners that break real builds.

That is also why Oxc is the right place for this work. Oxc positions itself as a Rust-based JavaScript and TypeScript toolchain, and its transformer already includes React Fast Refresh support and other React-oriented features. A few months before the Oxc issue was filed, the React team reached out to both SWC and Oxc to collaborate on an official plugin so React apps could drop Babel pipelines when Babel was only being used to run React Compiler. That is the larger inflection point here: if the last gaps close cleanly, React Compiler stops being another JavaScript stage and starts looking like invisible Rust infrastructure inside everyday React workflows.