Vite 8
Vite 8 moves to Rolldown, bringing a unified Rust toolchain, built-in DevTools, and new platform capabilities.
The Vite team has released Vite 8, one of the tool’s biggest updates in recent years. The headline news: Vite now runs on Rolldown, a new bundler written in Rust.
Previously, it used a combination of esbuild (dev) and Rollup (prod) under the hood. Everything is now unified in a single pipeline, simplifying the architecture and eliminating differences between development and production builds.
What’s new in Vite 8:
- ⚡️ Rolldown by default: a Rust bundler with speed comparable to esbuild that can be 10–30x faster than Rollup for production builds.
- 🧩 A unified toolchain: Vite is now part of Vite → Rolldown → Oxc (the compiler). This enables deeper pipeline optimizations and faster adoption of new JavaScript features.
- 🛠 Built-in DevTools: you can enable
vite devtoolsdirectly in the dev server to analyze and debug your project. - 📦 tsconfig paths out of the box: TypeScript aliases can be enabled with a single option (
resolve.tsconfigPaths).
🧪 New platform capabilities:
- support for
emitDecoratorMetadatawithout plugins - SSR support for
.wasm?init - forwarding browser
consoleoutput to the dev server’s terminal.
There is also an update to @vitejs**/plugin-react v6**: React Refresh now runs through Oxc, and Babel is no longer a dependency.
Interestingly, the team is already experimenting with Full Bundle Mode, where the dev server bundles modules just as it does in production. In prototypes, this delivers up to 3x faster server startup and fewer network requests.
💭 In short, Vite is gradually evolving from a “convenient dev server” into a full-fledged Rust-based frontend toolchain.