Rest

Rest is the TypeScript compiler and bundler for Editor.Land. It is built on OXC (Oxidation Compiler), a Rust-native TypeScript parser and transformer, combined with esbuild for final bundling.

The Problem

VS Code builds its TypeScript source with tsc running inside Node.js. The entire compile step carries the overhead of a JavaScript runtime: garbage collection pauses, JIT warmup, single-threaded type checking. A clean build of the VS Code workbench takes minutes.

Even modern alternatives like esbuild, while dramatically faster than tsc, still run inside a Go runtime with its own garbage collector.

How Rest Addresses It

Rest is built on OXC, a Rust-native TypeScript parser and code generator. Parsing, transformation, and code emission happen in native code with no garbage collection pauses.

OXC handles TypeScript syntax stripping, JSX transformation, and module resolution natively. Rest wraps OXC with a plugin-routed architecture that feeds transformed output into esbuild for final bundling, combining OXC’s parsing speed with esbuild’s battle-tested code splitting.

OXC’s own benchmarks show significant speed improvements over esbuild and tsc for equivalent workloads. Rest’s measured build times in Land’s specific pipeline have not been independently published yet.

Source Structure

Rest’s source tree (confirmed in the repository):

Path	Role
`Source/Binary.rs`	Binary entry point
`Source/Main.rs`	Main function
`Source/Library.rs`	Crate root re-exports
`Source/Fn/`	Core function modules
`Source/Struct/`	Data structure definitions

What You Experience

Clean builds complete faster than a tsc-based pipeline. Incremental rebuilds during development are substantially faster than running tsc directly. The exact improvement depends on the size of the TypeScript surface being compiled.

CI pipelines benefit equally: build times drop and merge queues move faster compared to a tsc baseline.

Key Technologies

Rust, OXC, esbuild, Plugin-Routed Bundling, Zero-GC TypeScript Compilation.