Steve Kinney

Tailwind Oxide

Oxide is Tailwind 4’s high-performance engine—a ground-up rewrite initially planned for Tailwind 3.x.

  • Built with Rust: Performance-critical parts rewritten for speed
  • Powered by Lightning CSS: Fast Rust-based CSS parser/transformer (only dependency)
  • Custom CSS Parser: 2x faster than PostCSS
  • Unified Toolchain: Built-in @import, vendor prefixing, nesting, modern CSS transforms
  • Zero-Configuration: Automatically finds template files
  • CSS-First Configuration: Use @theme and CSS variables instead of JavaScript
  • Composable Variants: Combine group-*, peer-*, has-*, not-*
  • Modern CSS: Native cascade layers, @property, color-mix(), container queries
  • Removed Deprecated Utilities: Cleaned up from v3
  • Changed Defaults: border and ring now use currentColor
  • Safelisting: Use @source inline() in CSS (not JavaScript)
  • Explicit Exclusion: @source not inline()

As Compared to the Older Method

  • Performance: 10x faster full builds (105ms vs 960ms), 100x faster incremental builds
  • Developer Experience: Zero-config detection, CSS-first configuration (no tailwind.config.js)
  • Toolchain: Built-in CSS processing (no need for postcss-import, autoprefixer); separate PostCSS/CLI packages
  • Modern CSS: Native @layer, @property, color-mix(), container queries (no plugin needed)
  • Flexibility: Composable variants for complex selectors
  • Class Detection: Same plain-text scanning, still requires static classes, but automatic
  • Removed/Changed: No corePlugins, theme() deprecated, @apply requires @reference, @layer → @utility, variant order left-to-right (was right-to-left)
  • Browser Support: Requires Safari 16.4+, Chrome 111+, Firefox 128+ (v3 had broader support)

Last modified on .