JavaScript build tool: Vite 8.0 speeds up with Rust-based bundler Rolldown
The new bundler Rolldown replaces esbuild and Rollup. With its Rust base, it enables significantly faster builds.
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Vite 8.0 has been released. Under the hood, the frontend build tool now includes Rolldown – a Rust-based bundler that ensures higher build speeds. Additionally, a new registry is available for finding plugins.
The current State of JavaScript survey recently showed that Vite is once again the most popular tool among JavaScript developers and is only slightly behind webpack in terms of usage frequency.
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Rolldown replaces Rollup and esbuild
Vite once started with the two bundlers esbuild and Rollup. esbuild was used during development, and Rollup for optimized production builds. With Vite 8.0, the switch is now being made to Rolldown as a unified bundler, replacing the two predecessors. This is said to be the most significant change since Vite 2.0.
Rolldown, like Vite, comes from VoidZero. The bundler has a Rollup-compatible API, is based on the Rust programming language, and is said to enable 10 to 30 times faster builds. For example, production build times decreased by 38 percent during the beta phase of rolldown-vite at Mercedes-Benz.io, and by 64 percent for the newsletter platform Beehiiv.
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Another new feature is the website registry.vite.dev, a searchable directory of plugins for Vite, Rolldown, and Rollup. The data sources are npm and metadata provided by plugin authors. This data is updated daily. Plugin authors can provide additional metadata by adding the compatiblePackages field in the package's JSON file.
Update to the new release
The switch to Vite 8.0 should be straightforward for most developers. However, for complex projects, the Vite team recommends a gradual migration: first, switch from the vite package to the rolldown-vite package in Vite 7, and only then switch to Vite 8. This makes it easier to determine if any potential difficulties stem from the new bundler. Developers can find further information in the migration guide.
As the Vite team admits, the installation size of Vite 8 is about 15 MB larger than Vite 7. This is mainly because lightningcss is no longer an optional dependency and the Rolldown binary is larger than esbuild and Rollup. However, a reduction in installation size is planned.
All further details about Vite 8.0 can be found in the Vite blog and in the changelog.
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