Performance

Pre-Release

Verter is pre-release software. APIs may change between releases — see the API Stability document.

Verter's template compiler is written in Rust and exposed to Node.js via NAPI-RS. On average, it compiles Vue SFC templates approximately 9x faster than Vue's JavaScript compiler.

Benchmark Results

The following benchmarks compare Verter's Rust compiler against Vue's @vue/compiler-sfc across 8 real-world-style fixtures of varying size and complexity, plus a 20,000-file stress test.

Fixture	Size	Vue (ops/s)	Verter (ops/s)	Speedup	Throughput
tiny-template	42 B	21,240	112,368	5.3x	4.50 MB/s
simple-interactive	242 B	3,140	52,440	16.7x	12.10 MB/s
list-rendering	1.3 KB	1,141	15,066	13.2x	18.85 MB/s
conditional-heavy	2.0 KB	1,288	14,928	11.6x	29.27 MB/s
form-component	4.3 KB	750	7,359	9.8x	30.58 MB/s
composition-heavy	9.0 KB	368	3,644	9.9x	31.86 MB/s
template-heavy	8.5 KB	1,077	2,914	2.7x	24.20 MB/s
kitchen-sink	26.7 KB	141	1,106	7.8x	28.86 MB/s
20k files (stress)	127 MB	30.8s	5.0s	6.1x	25.16 MB/s

Average speedup: 9.2x. Throughput scales from ~4.5 MB/s on tiny files to ~32 MB/s on larger components, as the fixed per-file overhead becomes proportionally smaller.

Key Observations

• Small files see the highest relative speedup (up to 16.7x) because Rust's lower per-call overhead dominates.
• Large files show consistent throughput around 25--32 MB/s, indicating efficient linear scaling.
• template-heavy has the lowest speedup (2.7x) because it exercises codegen more heavily relative to parsing. This is still nearly 3x faster.
• The 20k file stress test processes 127 MB of Vue SFCs in 5 seconds, demonstrating real-world build performance for large projects.

Methodology

Benchmarks use 8 Vue SFC fixtures that cover a range of component patterns:

• tiny-template -- Minimal template with a single element
• simple-interactive -- Basic reactive bindings and event handlers
• list-rendering -- v-for with keyed lists
• conditional-heavy -- Nested v-if/v-else-if/v-else chains
• form-component -- Form inputs with v-model and validation
• composition-heavy -- Complex <script setup> with composables
• template-heavy -- Large template with many nested elements
• kitchen-sink -- Everything combined in one large SFC

The 20,000-file stress test generates synthetic SFCs of varying sizes and compiles them all sequentially to measure sustained throughput.

Benchmarks are run in CI and can be triggered on any pull request by posting a /benchmark comment.

Running Locally

The benchmark suite is in the crates/verter_bench/ directory. To run it:

cargo bench --package verter_bench

For the comparison benchmarks against Vue's compiler:

pnpm --filter @verter/bench bench

Pre-Compilation for Faster Builds

Beyond raw compiler speed, Verter's @verter/unplugin supports a preCompile option that compiles all .vue files during buildStart before bundling begins. This front-loads compilation work and caches results, so subsequent transform() calls return instantly:

// vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from 'vite'
import VerterVite from '@verter/unplugin/vite'

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    VerterVite({
      preCompile: true,
    }),
  ],
})

See Cross-File Optimization for how preCompile enables whole-program analysis.

Next Steps

• Features -- Type safety features overview
• Cross-File Optimization -- Whole-program prop constness analysis
• Architecture -- How the compiler pipeline works