Evan You | Keynote: Vite and the Future of JavaScript Tooling | ViteConf 2024

Vite has reached over 15 million weekly downloads and has become the default tooling for most JavaScript frameworks except Next.js

Current challenges with JavaScript tooling include fragmentation, incompatibilities, and inefficiencies due to multiple tools being used (ESBuild, Rollup, SWC)

Void Zero company was started to build next-generation JavaScript tooling, raising $4.6M in seed funding

Rolldown is a new unified bundler being developed that is:

• Written in Rust for better performance
• 2x faster than existing solutions
• Maintains 90% compatibility with Rollup
• Includes built-in TypeScript and JSX support

OXC is being developed as a comprehensive toolchain that includes:

• Parser
• Linker
• Transformer
• Minifier
• Significantly smaller binary size (1.95MB vs 37MB for SWC)
• Uses less memory than alternatives like Babel and SWC

Future version of Vite (V6) will:

• Use Rolldown as the unified bundler
• Eliminate development/production inconsistencies
• Improve build performance
• Provide better HMR capabilities

The goal is to create a unified, high-performance, composable, and runtime-agnostic toolchain for JavaScript development

Benefits of the new toolchain include:

• Faster page loads in development
• Better consistency across environments
• Reduced complexity and overhead
• Improved production build performance