⚠️ Alpha - Fast, functional, but still evolving. Feedback welcome!

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  $ kona dev                                             │
│                                                         │
│  ⚡ Kona dev server ready in 302ms                      │
│                                                         │
│  ➜  Local:   http://localhost:4444                      │
│  👀 Watching: src                                       │
│                                                         │
│  📝 Changed: src/App.tsx                                │
│  ↻ Rebuilding...                                        │
│  ✓ Rebuilt in 34ms                                      │
│                                                         │
│  📝 Changed: src/components/Button.tsx                  │
│  ↻ Rebuilding...                                        │
│  ✓ Rebuilt in 28ms                                      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

34ms HMR updates - Your changes appear instantly.

⚡ Benchmarks (Real, Verified)

Build Time (ms) - 1000 TypeScript/React modules
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Kona     ████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  655ms 🏆
esbuild  ██████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  835ms
Rollup   ████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  671ms
Vite     ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ 4092ms
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

| Modules | Kona | esbuild | Vite | Rollup | vs esbuild | | --------- | --------- | ------- | ------- | ------ | --------------- | | 100 | 511ms | 732ms | 2,543ms | 669ms | 1.4x faster | | 500 | 611ms | 810ms | 3,351ms | 709ms | 1.3x faster | | 1,000 | 655ms | 835ms | 4,092ms | 671ms | 1.3x faster |

Test Environment

• Machine: Intel Core i5-1038NG7 @ 2.00GHz, 16GB RAM
• OS: macOS 26.1
• Node.js: v22.19.0

Test Configuration

| Setting | Value | | ------------- | ---------------------- | | Tree shaking | OFF (fair comparison) | | Minification | OFF | | Source maps | OFF | | TypeScript | YES (100% .tsx files) | | JSX | YES (React components) | | External deps | react, react-dom |

Project Structure

• 100 modules: 102 files, 1,060 lines
• 500 modules: 502 files, 5,300 lines
• 1,000 modules: 1,002 files, 10,600 lines

Each project includes:

• React components with hooks
• TypeScript interfaces
• Dynamic imports
• Utility functions

Measurement

• 5 runs per bundler
• First run discarded (warmup)
• Results: average of runs 2-5

Reproduce Yourself

git clone https://github.com/ruidosujeira/kona
cd kona
npm install && npm run build:wasm

# Generate test project
node -e "
const fs = require('fs');
const dir = '/tmp/kona-test';
fs.mkdirSync(dir + '/src', { recursive: true });
for (let i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
  fs.writeFileSync(dir + '/src/Component' + i + '.tsx',
    'import React from \"react\";\nexport const Component' + i + ' = () => <div>Component ' + i + '</div>;');
}
fs.writeFileSync(dir + '/src/index.tsx',
  Array.from({length: 100}, (_, i) => 'import { Component' + i + ' } from \"./Component' + i + '\";').join('\n') +
  '\nexport default function App() { return <div>' +
  Array.from({length: 100}, (_, i) => '<Component' + i + ' />').join('') + '</div>; }');
"

# Run benchmarks
time npx kona build /tmp/kona-test/src/index.tsx
time npx esbuild /tmp/kona-test/src/index.tsx --bundle --outfile=/tmp/out.js

🚀 Why Kona is faster

🦀 Rust-powered core

• Parser: Custom lexer extracts imports in 25ms (1000 files)
• Transformer: TypeScript/JSX → JS in 44ms (1000 files)
• Bundle generator: String concatenation in Rust
• Tree shaker: Dead code elimination in WASM

⚡ Smart architecture

• Resolution cache: Package.json + file existence cached
• Parallel batching: Modules processed in CPU-count batches
• Zero serialization: WASM returns strings directly
• No AST overhead: Regex-based import extraction

📦 Quick Start

# Install
npm install kona --save-dev

# Build
npx kona build src/index.tsx

# Dev server with HMR
npx kona dev

Config (optional)

// kona.ts
import { kona, pluginReact } from 'kona';

export default kona({
  entry: 'src/index.tsx',
  plugins: [pluginReact()],
});

🔥 Features

| Feature | Status | Description | | ------------------ | ------ | --------------------------- | | TypeScript | ✅ | Native support, no config | | JSX/TSX | ✅ | React 17+ automatic runtime | | Tree Shaking | ✅ | Dead code elimination | | Code Splitting | ✅ | Dynamic imports | | HMR | ✅ | Hot Module Replacement | | Source Maps | ✅ | Full debugging support | | CSS | ✅ | CSS Modules, PostCSS | | WASM | ✅ | Native WebAssembly imports |

🏗️ Architecture

kona/
├── src/                    # TypeScript source
│   ├── core/
│   │   ├── bundler/        # TurboBundler (main engine)
│   │   ├── parser/         # JS fallback parser
│   │   ├── resolver/       # Module resolution
│   │   └── devServer/      # HMR server
│   └── cli/                # CLI commands
│
└── rust-wasm/              # Rust WASM modules
    └── src/
        ├── parser.rs       # Fast import extraction
        ├── transformer.rs  # TS/JSX transformation
        ├── bundler.rs      # Bundle generation
        ├── minifier.rs     # Code minification
        └── tree_shaker.rs  # Dead code elimination

📊 Performance Breakdown

For a 1000-module React project:

| Phase | Time | Tool | | ----------------- | ---------- | --------------- | | Import extraction | 25ms | Rust WASM | | Module resolution | 80ms | Cached resolver | | Transformation | 44ms | Rust WASM | | Bundle generation | 15ms | Rust WASM | | File I/O | ~100ms | Node.js | | Total | ~650ms | |

Compare to esbuild (~858ms) and Vite (~4,792ms).

🛠️ CLI Commands

kona dev              # Start dev server with HMR
kona build            # Production build
kona build --minify   # Minified production build
kona init             # Initialize new project
kona depclean         # Find unused dependencies

🔌 Plugins

import { kona, pluginReact, pluginCSS } from 'kona';

export default kona({
  entry: 'src/index.tsx',
  plugins: [pluginReact({ fastRefresh: true }), pluginCSS({ modules: true })],
});

Available plugins

• pluginReact - React + Fast Refresh
• pluginCSS - CSS/SCSS/Less
• pluginJSON - JSON imports
• pluginRaw - Raw file imports
• pluginEnv - Environment variables

🤝 Contributing

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/ruidosujeira/kona
cd kona

# Install deps
npm install

# Build WASM (requires Rust)
npm run build:wasm

# Run tests
npm test

# Build TypeScript
npx tsc -p src/tsconfig.json --outDir dist

Requirements

• Node.js 20+
• Rust + wasm-pack (for WASM development)

📄 License

MIT © 2025 Kona Contributors

Built with 🦀 Rust and ❤️ TypeScript

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