Rolldown

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

Rolldown is Vite's answer to why do we need three different bundlers glued together. It's a Rust based bundler built to replace Rollup as Vite's production bundler while matching esbuild's dev server speed, meaning one fast tool instead of a Frankenstein pipeline. Think of it as Vite finally building its own engine instead of borrowing parts.

Real Talk

Rolldown is a Rust based JavaScript bundler, built by the Vite team, designed to replace Rollup in Vite's production build pipeline while offering Rollup compatible APIs and plugin interfaces. It aims to unify Vite's dev time and build time bundling under one significantly faster native toolchain.

Show Me The Code

// vite.config.ts, opting into the Rolldown powered Vite build
import { defineConfig } from 'rolldown-vite'

export default defineConfig({
  build: { target: 'es2022' }
})

When You'll Hear This

"Once Rolldown lands as Vite's default, our cold build times should drop dramatically." / "Rolldown still needs a few Rollup plugins ported before we can fully switch over."