farm-fe/farm

Extremely fast Vite-compatible web build tool written in Rust

Summary

Farm is a web build tool written in Rust that positions itself as a Vite-compatible alternative aimed at faster builds in large frontend projects. The project is at a 1.0 stable release, compiles JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX/TSX, CSS, CSS Modules, HTML, and static assets out of the box, and is published under the MIT license.

What it is useful for

The README describes Farm as targeting situations where existing tools fall short, particularly large Vite projects. It calls out three specific problems the project tries to address: a large number of in-flight module requests during development that can make refreshes take seconds on pages with hundreds or thousands of modules; inconsistency between development and production build strategies, which makes production bugs harder to reproduce; and inflexible code splitting.

For engineers, Farm is useful when you want:

• A Rust-based build pipeline with HMR that the README says completes within 20ms in most situations.
• Persistent, module-level disk caching enabled by default since v0.14, so unchanged modules are not recompiled.
• Dev/prod consistency from the same pipeline, including tree shaking and minification for production.
• Lazy compilation for dynamic imports, so dynamically imported modules are only built when requested.
• Partial bundling that produces a small number of reasonable bundles while keeping cache granularity (documented in RFC-003 Partial Bundling).
• Vite plugin compatibility since v0.13, alongside Farm-native Rust and JavaScript compilation plugins, runtime plugins, and a server plugin.
• Official compilation plugins for React, Vue, Sass, Less, and PostCSS, plus support for both legacy (ES5) and modern browsers.

How engineers can use it

The README documents a single scaffolded start path:

# with npm
npm create farm@latest
# with yarn
yarn create farm@latest
# with pnpm
pnpm create farm@latest

Beyond the scaffolder, the README does not detail configuration, deployment, or framework-specific wiring in-line; it directs readers to the Farm documentation site, the Incremental Building page, the Using Vite plugins in Farm guide, RFC-001 Architecture, and RFC-003 Partial Bundling. For environment variables, custom plugins, or production deployment specifics, those external docs are required. The project is MIT-licensed, and contribution guidance lives in CONTRIBUTING.md.