The oxc project shipped a native Rust implementation of React Compiler, called oxc-transform-react, and @vitejs/plugin-react added experimental native support for it in version 6.1.0 through pull request 1419, according to the vite-plugin-react repository on GitHub.
Developers enable it by installing oxc-transform-react and passing { compiler: true } to the Vite React plugin, removing the need for a separate Babel setup, the repository shows.
A benchmark published on developer blog Master.dev found the Rust compiler more than 10 times faster than Babel on the compiler phase alone. On a 1,036-file codebase, compile time for that phase dropped from 14.3 seconds to 0.81 seconds, a 17.6-times speedup, while overall build time improved from 22.1 seconds to 9.3 seconds, the blog reported. The Rust version also supports patterns the original compiler rejected, including try/catch logic and destructured prop reassignment, according to the post.
It's a boring upgrade in the best sense: drop a dependency, keep the same optimizations, and every build on the affected codebase gets faster without anyone rewriting a line of application code.