Summary

Breaking Change: resolve.roots defaults to []

Before: resolve.roots defaulted to [context], mirroring webpack's behavior.
After: resolve.roots defaults to [].

Motivation

When resolving an absolute path specifier (e.g., /Users/foo/bar/baz.ts), rspack-resolver first
probes each entry in roots by joining it with the specifier — so roots: [context] causes N
filesystem stat calls on paths like {context}/Users/foo/bar/... before falling through to the
correct absolute path resolution. This is pure IO waste for the common case where an absolute path
is meant to be exactly that.

Server-relative URL resolution (e.g., importing '/static/app.js' and expecting it to resolve
relative to the project root) is a narrow use case. Making roots: [context] the default imposes
unnecessary overhead on every project that never uses this feature.

Migration

If you rely on server-relative URL resolution, explicitly restore the previous behavior:

// rspack.config.js
module.exports = {
  resolve: {
    roots: [__dirname], // previously the default
  },
};

Related links

Checklist

• Tests updated (or not required).
• Documentation updated (or not required).