Richard Oliver Bray

Posted on Jun 11

Why Rolldown-Vite Is Going To Replace Vite (And Why You Should Care)

#webdev #javascript #vite #programming

It feels like just yesterday I was writing about replacing Webpack with Vite, and here we are again with another potential game-changer in the JavaScript build tool ecosystem. The world of JavaScript tooling moves really quickly, and now there's a new development that could make your existing Vite projects build up to 16 times faster: Rolldown-Vite.

You can watch this article if you prefer video content.

If you've been following the JavaScript tooling space, you'll know that we've seen this cycle before. First there was Grunt then there was Gulp, then Webpack dominated for years (and still kind of does in some cases). Recently Vite has been the go-to choice for new projects. Now, the Vite team themselves are working on something that could supercharge the tool we already love.

What is Rolldown-Vite?

Rolldown-Vite is not a replacement for Vite itself. Instead, it's a Rust-based drop-in replacement for Vite's internal bundlers (ESBuild and Rollup). Think of it as Vite with a turbocharged engine under the hood.

Developed by Evan You (creator of Vue.js) and the VoidZero team, Rolldown-Vite uses the high performance of Rust to deal with bottlenecks in the current JavaScript-based Vite toolchain.

The numbers are very impressive:

A React project with 10,000 JSX components: 14 seconds with Vite → under 4 seconds with Rolldown-Vite (70% faster)
Excalidraw's build time: 22.9 seconds → 1.4 seconds
GitLab's build time: 2.5 minutes → 40 seconds

Understanding Vite's Current Architecture

To understand why Rolldown-Vite gives these performance improvements, we need to look at how Vite currently works:

Development: Uses ESBuild (written in Go) for fast bundling and transformations
Production: Uses Rollup (written in JavaScript) for final builds (I think)

While this setup has worked well for years, Rollup being written in JavaScript isn't the most performant option for building large-scale applications, especially in a CI/CD pipeline.

How Rolldown-Vite Changes the Game

Rolldown-Vite replaces both ESBuild and Rollup with a single, unified Rust-based bundler called Rolldown. This provides:

Consistent performance across development and production
Massive speed improvements thanks to Rust's performance characteristics
Reduced memory usage - crucial for large projects
Full compatibility with existing Vite plugins and configurations

At the heart of this is Oxc, a.k.a the Oxidation compiler which provides a parser*, for understanding JavaScript and TypeScript code. A **transformer for converting modern syntax to compatible versions. A resolver for handling module resolution. A minifier for optimising production builds, and a linter - for code quality checks.

Rolldown then uses Oxc as its foundational layer to provide the bundling functionality. This means instead of having separate tools for different tasks, everything runs through a single, highly optimized Rust-based pipeline.

The Rust Revolution Continues

There's definitely a pattern emerging in the JavaScript tooling space - everything is being rewritten in Rust. We've seen it with:

SWC (replacing Babel)
Turbopack (Webpack's successor)
RSPack and Farm (other bundling solutions)
Rolldown (now powering Vite)

Honestly, I'm not sure if I like (Golang FTW), it but it looks like things are going that way.

Rust provides the performance benefits that JavaScript simply can't match when it comes to intensive tasks like bundling, minification, and code transformation.

How To Switch?

The beauty of Rolldown-Vite is that it's designed as a true drop-in replacement. In most cases, you can try it by simply aliasing the Vite package to rolldown-vite in your package.json:

// package.json
{
  "dependencies": {
    // ...
    "vite": "6.3.5" // <-- before
    "vite": "npm:rolldown-vite@latest" // <-- after
  }
}

If you're happy with your current Vite setup and build times aren't an issue, there's no urgent need to switch. I mean, for me Vite has always been super fast.

But, if you're working on larger projects where build times are becoming a bottleneck, Rolldown-Vite can provide significant improvements with minimal effort.

Top comments (11)

Best Codes • Jun 13 • Edited

rolldown-vite is not replacing vite. Vite is just migrating from Rollup to Rolldown.

This is very clearly stated in the project README:

rolldown-vite is a fork of Vite that uses Rolldown instead of Rollup & esbuild. Rolldown is a Rust-based JavaScript bundler designed for maximum performance.

It can be used as a drop-in replacement to test out Rolldown with Vite. Eventually, this package is not needed anymore as all changes will be merged into the main Vite repository.

And just above that, there is a note which says “Temporary package.”

(Chrome highlight link to the above)

david duymelinck • Jun 12

On the Vite website I found the announcement
So instead of replacing Vite, like you mention in the title, it is just the next generation of their build engine. The fact that they had two build engines was never going to last. So now they made the choice for the future.

The elephant in the room for me is, why do we need faster and faster bundlers? I thought the time of indiscriminate use of javascript in the frontend is over?
I even seen people who adopted a no build attitude. That might be too extreme for some types of websites, but for other types it could be the default.

Richard Oliver Bray • Jun 12

I agree to a certain extent, build tools feel like extra work for a simple project. But for large scale projects they're really useful. I haven't worked on a large project in years but I remember the days working on an app 100s of components and pages, and complex workflows. Running Cypress tests via CircleCI took a while and this would have been useful back then.

Alois Sečkár • Jun 12

The next generation of Vite will be much more than just a "faster bundler". They are building a whole unified and optimized stack of JS tools - check oxc.rs/

And why? Because there is always a room for improvement. Tens of secods are already great compared to tens of minutes of compiling big enterprise Java apps for example. But units or even fraction of seconds are even better.

david duymelinck • Jun 12 • Edited

The next generation of Vite will be much more than just a "faster bundler"

That is possible, but with my comment I only addressed the jobs of the libraries that are being replaced. And that it is not a new tool you need to learn, as suggested in the beginning of the post and by the title.

there is always a room for improvement

I am not denying that. My question is alluding that if you have faster bundlers the size of the code you push to the browser is going to feel less significant. It is the same trap than having a powerful computer and running the application on that machine, to find out on other machines it runs slow.
Faster development tools can create blindspots.

Nevo David • Jun 12

Pretty cool seeing the speed moves - always gets me thinking how much tooling's changed since Webpack days.

Dotallio • Jun 12

The speed numbers you shared are honestly wild, especially for those huge projects. Have you hit any issues with existing Vite plugins not playing nice with Rolldown-Vite yet?

NDREAN • Jun 13 • Edited

I tried the plugins below without problem. The compile time of 3MB went from 2.5s down to 0.7s in dev mode, and from 15s to 3s to build the prod code, which seems like immediate.

import { VitePWA } from "vite-plugin-pwa";
import solidPlugin from "vite-plugin-solid";
import wasm from "vite-plugin-wasm";
import { compression } from "vite-plugin-compression2";
import { viteStaticCopy } from "vite-plugin-static-copy";
import { compress } from "@mongodb-js/zstd";