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#Frontend

Vite: The Documentary (Frontend column)

#Frontend #Software #Documentary #Engineering #Architecture #Management #SoftwareDevelopment

He came out last week. documentary about Vite or as a side project of Evan Yu (Vue.js author) In a few years, he changed the whole front. Let’s start with why Vite is so important. It came in response to Webpack becoming too slow and cumbersome. At this point, Evan Yu, the author of Vue.js, was trying to make DevEx engineers write on Vue, and he tried a radically different approach: run a dev server without bandling, giving the modules directly to the browser through ESModules. Thus came Vite - a tool that:

  • Starts almost instantly; Updates the code without reloading the page (hot module replacement, HMR); Compiles dependencies through esbuild and Rollup, providing speed at the level of Rust solutions.

At the beginning of the film, the phrase “if you write on a modern JS framework, you most likely use Vite” is not an exaggeration. It runs Vue, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Astro, Remix, Qwik, Laravel, Shopify Hydrogen and dozens of other frameworks. The authors of the film talk about the timeline development of technology, which looks something like this.

  • 2020 First version as a dev server for Vue.
  • 2021 - Vite 2.0 Multi-framework, transition SvelteKit and Laravel.
  • 2022 Ecosystem explodes: ViteConf, Vitest, integration with Nuxt 3 and Astro.
  • 2023 Remix and RedwoodJS move to Vite; the announcement of Rust-bandler Rolldown.
  • 2024 Founded by VoidZero; Vite 6.0, 17 Millions of downloads per week.
  • 2025 The premiere of the film and plans for Rust-realization of the entire stack.

Key factors DevEx, for which engineers loved Vite Speed: Dev server starts in seconds, HMR - almost instantaneous. Simplicity: minimal configuration and plug-in architecture. Extensibility: a single base for React, Vue, Svelte, Qwik, etc.

  • Integration: testing (Vitest), Storybook, E2E (Cypress, Playwright), Laravel, Rails.
  • Community: 850+ contributors, dozens of companies (Google, Shopify, Cloudflare, NASA, OpenAI).

But Vite does not stand still and VoidZero already writes its own tools on Rust: Rolldown - Rollup replacement inside the Vite

  • Oxc - fast parser and linter; There are plans for "Vite+" - a single stack for assembly, testing and formatting.
  • There is a movement towards AI - at ViteConf 2025 We have already discussed agents who help create applications on Vite.

The film turned out not only about technology, but also about the community: how the engineering “side project” became the point of unification of the frontend.

I’ve previously talked about other documentaries in the same series and can recommend them to fans of technology and stories about their creation and development.

#Software #Documentary #Engineering #Architecture #Management #SoftwareDevelopment