Development
Vite 8.0 has been released, and it uses Rust-built Rolldown as its single bundler, replacing both esbuild and Rollup, to enable faster builds.Vite is both a development server and a build tool for TypeScript and JavaScript applications, with support for hot module replacement (HMR), which updates code without a full page reload, and plugins to add functionality such as framework-specific features. Vite can be used with many frameworks and, according to the introductory post for version 8.0, is currently downloaded 65 million times a week.
Rolldown is intended to be compatible with existing plugins since it supports the same plugin API. Although it is included with Vite 8, the Rolldown project still has release candidate status, and its minification feature – where source code is reduced to a small size with strategies such as the smallest possible variable names – is in alpha.Rolldown is built on top of Oxc, also coded with Rust. Oxc is a utility whose features include linting, formatting, parsing, transpiling TypeScript and JSX (code to define React elements), module resolution, and minification.Both Rolldown and Oxc are open source projects sponsored by Void Zero, a company founded in 2024 by Evan You, creator of both Vite and the Vue.js framework. When the company was founded, You said that a unified toolchain was necessary to overcome the challenges of the JavaScript ecosystem: "fragmentation, incompatibilities, and inefficiency."
