Evan You, creator of the Vue.JS web framework and Vite build tool, recently announced the creation of VoidZero Inc., a company dedicated to building a unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. You posits that VoidZero may succeed where Rome, a previous project with similar goals, failed as it would inherit the large user base from the popular Vite toolchain. While VoidZero would release open-source software, the company itself is VC-funded.
VoidZero aims at creating an open-source, high-performance, and unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem that covers parsing, formatting, linting, bundling, minification, testing, and other common tasks that are part of the web development life cycle. While unified, the toolchain would be made of components that cover a specific task of the development cycle and can be used independently.
High performance would result from using the system development language Rust. Rust’s compile-to-native nature removes layers of abstraction and is credited to run at close-to-native speed. Rust’s memory safety features additionally facilitate concurrently running tasks and better utilization of multicore architectures. Additional performance gains come from better design (e.g., parsing once and using the same AST for all tasks in the development cycle).
The release note also mentions seeking to provide the same developer experience across all JavaScript runtimes. JavaScript is now being run in many different environments, including at the edge. New runtimes have appeared in recent years to reflect those new execution contexts (e.g., Deno, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, Amazon’s LLRT).
You justified its vision on Twitter:
The biggest challenge of a unified toolchain is the zero-to-one problem: it needs to gain critical mass for exponential adoption to justify continued development, but it is hard to cross the chasm before it actually fulfills the vision.
VoidZero does not have this problem, because Vite is already the fastest growing toolchain in the JavaScript ecosystem. And even by pure implementation progress, we’ve already built more than Rome did (before it transitioned into Biome) at this point. I think the premise that JS would benefit from a unified toolchain stands without questions – it’s the execution that matters.
Some developers on Reddit have raised concerns regarding VoidZero’s venture capital backing. The release note mentions that potential revenue incomes would come on top of the released open-source components in the shape of end-to-end solutions targeting the Enterprise segment, which has specific requirements in terms of scale and security. As adoption in the Enterprise is tied to adoption outside of the Enterprise (where developers are sourced from), VoidZero has an incentive to maintain free access to its core offering, beyond the usual benefits of open-source development. Trevor I. Lasn, in an article in which he elaborates on the pros and cons of VC funding, wonders:
[Premium features or enterprise solutions] aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Sustainable open source is good for everyone. But it does raise questions about long-term accessibility and potential lock-in.
The full release note is available online and includes many more technical details together with answers to a list of frequently asked questions.
