Vite 8 just released and Linear's builds reduced from 46 seconds to 6.
It's not wrong. Same codebase, same plugins, same CI. Just swapped the bundler.
The culprit? Rolldown 🦀
The culprit? Rolldown. A Rust-based bundler that replaces both esbuild and Rollup in one shot.
The context goes like this. Vite has effectively had a split personality since day one. esbuild for dev, Rollup for prod. Two tools, two behaviors, two bug surfaces.
Every single Vite user has hit that bug where something works in dev and breaks in prod. Different tree-shaking. Different chunk splitting. Different everything.
Vite 8 wipes that out.
Dev and prod are both Rolldown now. One bundler, one pipeline, one behavior.
The numbers are absurd 📊
According to the Vite team's benchmarks, Rolldown is 10 to 30x faster than Rollup while matching esbuild's speed.
→ Linear saw an 87% reduction in build times (46s → 6s)
→ Ramp reported 57% faster builds
→ Mercedes-Benz.io cut theirs by 38%
These aren't synthetic benchmarks. These are real production codebases.
But this is bigger than Vite
But this is the cool part. This isn't just a Vite story.
Look at what's happened to JS tooling in the last two years.
Webpack's stdout started falling to esbuild. esbuild was fast but missing features. Turbopack popped up in Rust. SWC ate Babel's lunch. Biome ate ESLint and Prettier. OXC started writing a whole Rust compiler. And now Rolldown kicked out Rollup.
Every single bottleneck in our JS build pipeline is being rewritten in Rust.
Why Rust keeps winning 🏆
The pattern is pretty obvious. NPM packages aren't cutting it anymore. The code's too big, the deps are too deep, the CI minutes are too expensive.
No, Rust rewrites aren't just faster. They're also cheaper. When Linear is saving 40 seconds a build and pushing 200 of those out every day, that's 40 minutes of real CI costs disappearing.
The migration is surprisingly painless
Here's the kicker. Most of your existing Vite plugins just work with Rolldown out of the box. Same (mostly) API. Which means the migration path is basically upgrade and test.
No big config rewrites. No plugins being recoded. They even pushed a registry at registry.vite.dev so you can see plugin compatibility before you upgrade.
There are tradeoffs. Vite 8 is about 15 MB larger because it bundles lightningcss and the Rolldown binary. And some advanced configs like manualChunks need updating to the new rolldownOptions format.
But if your build takes more than 10 seconds, those tradeoffs are worth it.
The Rust rewrite wave isn't over. Heck, I'd say Vite 8 just showed that it's hitting its stride.
What's your build time looking like these days? Has the Rust tooling wave actually hit your stack yet? 👇
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