Unlock Blazing-Fast Frontend Builds with Mako: Rust-Powered Speed and Real-World Benchmarks

What Is Mako?

Mako is an “ultra‑fast” and “production‑grade” frontend build tool built on Rust. Its speed focus stems from the original goal of eliminating build‑time bottlenecks, and it has been validated internally at Ant Group since November 2023 across thousands of projects and various platforms.

More features can be explored at https://makojs.dev/docs/features .

How Did Mako Originate?

In March 2023 the team launched three initiatives—Rust, SSR, and AIGC—and chose Rust to tackle build performance. Existing Rust tools were evaluated but the team opted for a custom solution to retain control, meet extensive internal customization needs, support modern meta‑frameworks with compile‑time requirements, and foster team growth in Rust.

The timeline shows kickoff in March 2023, first usable version in July 2023, internal release in November 2023, and open‑source in June 2024.

Speed Benchmarks

Benchmarks compare Mako against Turbopack on a MacBook Pro M2 Max, measuring dev cold start, HMR times, production build time, and JS bundle size. Results demonstrate up to a 4× speedup, e.g., Ant Design Pro full build drops from 16 s (Webpack) to 3.9 s (Mako), with near‑real‑time hot updates.

Additional tests show RSC‑based projects reducing build time from 36.7 s to 1.2 s.

Ant Design Pro full project build: Webpack 16 s vs. Mako 3.9 s (≈4× faster).

Real‑time hot updates with Mako.

RSC‑based project build time reduced from 36.7 s to 1.2 s.

$ git clone [email protected]:umijs/benchmark.git</code>
<code>$ cd benchmark</code>
<code>$ pnpm i</code>
<code>$ pnpm run setup</code>
<code>$ pnpm benchmark

Experimental SSU Feature

Mako includes an experimental SSU (similar to MFSU) that caches dependencies, offering a 10–50× dev hot‑start speedup when enabled via the SSU=true environment variable.

How to Get Started

To try Mako, create a project with the scaffold: $ npm create mako If you use Umi, enable Mako with:

# Confirm version is 4.2.0 or above
$ npx umi -v
4.2.0
# Enable Mako config
$ npx umi config set mako {}
# Run build or other commands
$ npx umi build

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all contributors, including code authors and community members, as well as the projects that inspired Mako such as webpack, swc, farm, rspack, and oxc‑resolver.