Evan You, the creator of the Vue.JS front-end framework, recently announced a technical preview for rolldown-vite, a drop-in replacement for the Vite bundler written in Rust. Early adopters (e.g., Excalidraw, GitLab) report 3-16x faster builds and dramatically reduced memory usage.
While rolldown-vite is still a technical preview, You said it reached initial feature parity with today’s Vite, enabling companies and open-source projects to already test it with their codebase. Reported results show dramatically improved build speeds and reduced memory usage:
- GitLab reduced build time from 2.5 minutes to just 40 seconds and cut their memory usage by 100x.
- Excalidraw’s build dropped from 22.9 seconds to 1.4 seconds (16x faster).
- PLAID Inc. saw one frontend’s build time fall from 1 minute 20 seconds to 5 seconds (16x faster).
- Appwrite builds went from over 12 minutes to just 3 minutes, with memory usage being slashed by 4x.
Readers may review additional results on the dedicated GitHub page. Mercedes Benz published an interesting write-up, emphasizing the engineering value of faster tools:
Given around 100 projects, an average of 600 commits per year per project, each one building and linting each time. We are talking about 500 hours saved per year, almost 21 days. Excluding the machine cost, since it is hard to calculate, we can imagine the engineering cost, both in productivity, focus, and just being able to enter the flow without hiccups.
Plugin and ecosystem compatibility require ongoing work. Plugin authors are encouraged to test and update their plugins with the help of the plugin author guide. While some Rollup plugins may work with minimal changes with rolldown-vite, others may have to perform structural adjustments that leverage the new Rust-powered internals.
You reports working on a full-bundle mode for the dev server motivated by limitations encountered in Enterprise setups. The team also plans to extend the use of Rust to more of Vite’s internals in order to further deliver performance gains.
Developers drew a comparison on Reddit with Biome, another web toolchain that currently includes a formatter and a linter. Biome however currently has a smaller scope than VoidZero’s Oxc toolchain, which, besides Rolldown (bundler), already released a parser, linter, resolver, and transformer — with a minifier and formatter already prototyped.
One developer additionally noted amusingly on Reddit:
The saying used to be everything will be written in JS. But it seems that Rust has taken the place of that joke.
Rust rewrites of JavaScript/TypeScript toolchains have been commonplace in recent years as JavaScript is dealing with larger codebases, including in Entreprise environments. Microsoft itself recently announced porting the TypeScript compiler to Rust with a 10x performance improvement.
Developers are invited to check the Rolldown migration guide for the latest compatibility notes, known issues, and migration tips. For the latest updates and details, refer to the rolldown-vite changelog.
