#Quix: A Lightning-Fast VTEX IO CLI Experiment

I spent too much time wondering how fast a very small part of the VTEX IO workflow could be.

Quix was the resulting Rust experiment: a tiny CLI that implemented enough of the VTEX IO workflow for me to compare it with the official tool.

#The experiment

The goal was not to replace the VTEX IO CLI. I wanted to see how small and fast the path from a local change to a linked app could become.

IMPORTANT:

Quix is an archived experiment and was never officially supported by VTEX. It should not be treated as a production replacement for the official CLI.

#Commands

The experiment implemented a deliberately small set of commands.

The main one was link, which linked a local app to the VTEX workspace associated with the active account.

Commands such as login and use were never implemented, so those still depended on the VTEX IO CLI.

#Benchmarks and reverse engineering

Building it meant inspecting the VTEX IO API closely enough to reproduce the small slice of behavior I needed. Two measurements were especially useful:

• Minifier benchmark: I compared sending raw files with minifying them through the minifier crate before quix link. The benchmark notes contain the results.

• Release compression: The release script built the binary with Cargo and compressed it with UPX, reducing the download size substantially.

        File size          Ratio     Format         Name
  ----------------------   -------   ------------   -----------
   1.990.232 ->    786.448    39,52%    macho/arm64    quix

The binary went from roughly 1.9 MB to 768 KB after compression.

  -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 ....  staff   768K ... .. ..:.. ./quix

#Results

I timed both CLIs with the time utility on an M1 MacBook Air, clearing the cache and unlinking every app between runs. This was a local comparison, not a comprehensive benchmark:

The official VTEX CLI is on the left and Quix is on the right.

#License

Quix is available under the Apache 2.0 license.