As far as Astral goes, so far they've distributed all the tooling separately but it seems they might be going towards consolidation as well.
Ah, great, another Javascript tooling stack! Let's jump on board! I'll get straight to configuring, replacing and patching as soon as possible. Or maybe let's just don't. I'm tired, Boss.
The current dominant toolchain has been very stable for years now, and is much better than the mess of Webpack/Rollup/Brunch/Grunt/Gulp/Bower/Browserify/Parcel/Snowpack/Turbopack/Babel/etc/etc.
The only problem is that NOW there are too many separate different tools that aren't bundlers, so in addition to Vite one also has to configure Prettier, Eslint, Vitest, Typescript, Husky, Lint-Staged, Playwright, DotEnv, what else?
A unified toolchain might not replace each and every tool above, but it will simplify a lot of this process.
It will also simplify migrating between tools that it doesn't intend to replace, like migrating between Typescript and Typescript-Go. Etc.
This is already the reality in Go, Rust and other languages.
"Vite+ will be source-available and offers a generous free tier."
I'm also a developer ( sometimes ) and we need to eat. However, for me these tools are too low of a level of he stack to monetize, so I'll probably stick with my collection of free tools.
Every for-profit is subject to being sold to someone with different plans. If the license is not fully open, it's not smart to expect the licensing terms to get worse.
I remember gulp/grunt saga, I remember webpack 5 saga and the most recent pain with eslint 8 → 9 is a final nail in the coffin of anything stable for web building.
The only two tools I like in the JS world is `yarn` and `prettier`. They're focused and do what they do well. But you add eslint and any of the others and their configuration is a full fledged turing machine. Even autotools feels nice in comparison to that mayhem.
I agree that ESLint can become a mess, which is why I'm ok with a new competitor that doesn't require the extra configuration. Sure: they're also replacing Prettier (unnecessary) but everyone can keep using Prettier and change if Oxfmt ever becomes better.
All the other tools here are either existing, or drop-in replacements.
The current version of webpack was released 5 years ago. You can keep using eslint 8 which was released 4 years ago. This really isn’t the constantly changing space it was in the 2010’s
You will certainly be able to compile it. You might have hard time updating it though.
Updating is a different matter, if you're using multiple tools, hundreds of packages and several configuration files.
Which is why a unified tool that doesn't require configuring 20 tools at once is a good idea IMO.
But now there’s no unifying principles behind anything. No conventions. It’s just incantations to get thing working nicely together. It’s all preprocessing and post processing, code generation an what not.
Everything else is smooth and silk
Ohh, yes eslint 8 => 9 migration were also a big pain to handle.
Still not resolved. Their main recommended config is still not updated for 9.
Like, their decision to change configuration format in a way that breaks all and every plugin, tutorial, project in existence as a giant "fuck you" to the whole ecosystem and all web developers of the world - isn't that a reason good enough to never come back at this tool ever again?
For all its warts and all the hate that it gets, at least autotools is stable and not introducing breaking changes.
What? That mess is still ongoing. Next.js for example (probably the most popular "out of the box" solution) technically uses SWC, but not quite, because it doesn't support `styled-components` so you need to use Babel for that. But wait, you might also need to use tailwind, and for that you'll need `postcss` which might also work with Babel with `babel-plugin-import-postcss` but not necessarily, could also just use it as a Next plugin, but that doesn't always[1] seem to work.
I don't think this mess will ever end unless we throw React/Vue, and all "reactive" frameworks in the dustbin and we'll get enough folks on board to re-invent the web starting from scratch. But no one really wants to do that (yet?), so even things like Bun or Deno will try to be as compatible as possible making continuous concessions that will lead to the ongoing spaghettification of toolchains.
In the C world, most tools are orthogonal. The compilers don't need to know about the design of the package managers and the task runners don't care about either. Yes, we have glue tooling, but that is also and external project and the dependencies are interfaces instead of monkey-patching each other.
This less a problem when your project is on the web though, because vite (and I think under the hood esbuild) transforms the imports gracefully.
You do know that Vite uses a lot of these behind the scenes right? Vite in general has much better defaults so that you don't have to configure them most of the time, but anything a bit out of the box will still require messing with the configs extensively.
Not like OPs Vite+ changes anything regarding that.
It used Rollup.
And it does so transparently, while the alternative, Rolldown, was being finished.
To me this sounds like a more than acceptable compromise in the interim.
Didn't have to touch the webpack stuff either. Perhaps the issues you're having are due to something else?
For NextJS, do you remember the runtime used for middlewares? What was this swc thing again?
It never ends. Every year new things are added and they never really replace anything, it's just one more thing to learn and maintain.
If every technology causes exactly 1 issue per week then you quickly spend 50% of your time fixing bugs that have absolutely zero to do with what your company is actually doing.
---- EDIT
And it doesn't even stop at issues. Every one of those technologies regularly goes through breaking changes. In the process, plugins are deprecated, new ones have completely different APIs. You want to upgrade one thing for a security fix, then you're forced to upgrade 10 other things and it spirals out of control and you've spent entire work days just sifting through change logs to change `excludeFile` to `excludedFile` to `includeGlob` to `fileFilter` to `streamBouncer` to I don't know what.
Opening up iOS or macOS app source code I haven't touched in years in the latest Xcode I just downloaded is a lot like that. There is anything from Swift errors to API changes to my build plist being invalid. And if I use any third-party tools, they probably don't work until I visit each one's latest readme.
And that's without even insisting on using the latest unstable tech (bun, biome, nextjs) like you did in your comment where you would expect that experience.
Because of Vite, there was a total of ZERO work from my side involved in changing from Rollup to Rolldown, or from babel to Esbuild to SWC.
The Rust/Go/uv model is the one to go. This is ONE step in this direction.
I haven't experienced nearly as much brittle build and dev tooling with other ecosystems, PHP or Python for example. Sure, they have their warts and problems and their fair amount of churn. But the sheer amount of JS tool and framework churn I experienced over the last few years was insane.
It might have cooled down somewhat by now, but I'm burned out. So reading about more churn to fix the churn just rubbed me the wrong way.
But many projects won't adopt it. There are so many competitors all with their own little ecosystems. So in the end, I'll still have to fix all the issues I fix right now PLUS the issues that Vite+ will add on its own.
The only chance I see for something like this actually working is if something like Node/NPM decided to add a default formatter, linter, and so on.
When these cynical takes were crafted, Angular, AngularJS, Aurelia, Backbone, Ember, Knockout, React and Vue were all competing for mindshare, with new members joining/leaving that group every month (anyone remember OJ.js and Google FOAM?) being compiled by traceur, 6to5, the Google Closure Compiler and others from (Iced) CoffeeScript, TypeScript, ES6, Atscript, Livescript and Closurescript. We had two fucking major package registries (npm and bower) for literally no reason and we’d use both in every project. We had like 4 ways of doing modules.
Today the stack has stabilized around React and Vue, with a couple perennial challengers like Suede in the background. Vite and Webpack have been the two main build toolchains for years now. We discarded all of those languages except for TypeScript (and new ES features if you want them, but there are fewer changes every year). There are a couple package management tools, but they’re cross-compatible-ish and all pull from the same registry.
So does the fact that it’s not NEARLY as bad as it was in 2015 mean that people in 2025 aren’t allowed to complain? Yes. Yes it does.
And as I wrote in another reply: of course other technologies are not without issues and have their churn and warts and problems, but the sheer amount of JS hype and tool and framework churn I experienced over the last few years was insane.
It might have cooled down somewhat by now, but I'm burned out. So reading about more churn to fix the churn just rubbed me the wrong way.
Especially eslint with their decision to change configuration format in a way that breaks all and every plugin, tutorial, project in existence as a giant "fuck you" to the whole ecosystem and all web developers of the world.
Jesus, it's bad enough I can't leave a js project for 6 months without it starting to rot. Now my cynicism has to be updated too?
Vite already has rolldown support in the current version, it's just in alpha/test stage.
https://vite.dev/guide/rolldown.html#how-to-try-rolldown
Nothing is keeping them to this plan other though, I hope they do follow through. That would make the graph on the page misleading in the other direction though as the speed feature would be included in the non plus version.
I want to also say I'm a happy vite user (and the other projects that team makes).
A big "Request early access" followed by a contact form at the top of the landing page is an instant redflag of vendor locking, who would ever want that?
Eventually you'll need to migrate away or cough up serious money. So yeah, not sure who'd go for this.
Mind you we use NX at the moment and that was quick and easy enough to set up with no major issues for years now, so I wonder what the USP of this tool is. We also use Vite in some projects in combination with NX so maybe this is mainly aimed at that.
I'm concerned that it erodes trust into vite and makes all the other open source maintainers contributing to /the commons/ asking some questions.
There is nothing really special about vite too. It's important, sure, but there is a lot of important open source projects that also need funding. Can all of them pull the same trick?
As for why? some people have very large codebase and prefers their developers to have better UX and are willing to pay for it. lower CI/CD server costs also directly translate to cost savings if you are Replit or stackblitz,
You may not like it, and that is ok. as individual developers are already benefitting from vite. and will get rolldown soon.
Vite is basically replicating what one would expect as normal behaviour from the JDK + IDE has been doing since years. Javascript was meant to be readable for an open web, nowadays it is compiled into a puddle of text.
It is OK to reinvent the wheel, it just doesn't look much better than the old one.
Works great.
But the requirements of "modern" software are always changing. Sure, the static table might be enough, but then some business person says, "It sure would be nice if I could check a little box in the table row or assign this user here..." and now you're adding little JS hacks. Again, not impossible, but at a certain scale, the ability to have infinite access to client driven reactivity becomes a real business empowerment.
Given the interest in the JS working group to add reactive Signals to the core language, I suspect this will only become _more_ prevalent in the future. Maybe it will need less input from frameworks to do the same work and we can move back towards using built-in browser APIs, but the programming model itself works really well (so much so that SwiftUI uses a very similar reactive UI programming model).
Again, I don't disagree with your point, just at a certain scale, it becomes a huge hassle to maintain. If people are going to use these tools and frameworks anyway, it helps the entire web to make them more efficient.
It is so different when compared to Java/.NET where organizing large code blocks and making sure the pieces work well together is so easy. Very frustrating as there is so much that can be done on a browser but hampered by a development environment not much different from only using a text editor.
It pains me that so many SaaS go for Next.js based SDKs, but at least it is the closest to Spring/Quarkus/ASP.NET in spirit.
Hot take but: it took 20 years for Next.js to catch up to 10% of WebForms offered.
But if people want whatever Next.js offers to build their copycat SaaS with shadcn/ui, so who am I to argue.
previously (i.e. before current viteconf), Evan had said that existing OSS (vite and below) will remain OSS. only newer tooling will be monetised
If anything, FE tooling starts looking like it moves to more sane place. Also Anthony Fu is cool
Me personally -- I would rather see it staying fully opensource and be funded through open collective or EU grants or something, like a lot of core stuff should. The fact this model doesn't work is sad.
I feel that something that the whole FE community gravitates to converge on should stay that way to prevent rag pulls and license dramas, otherwise it sabotages the process of converging on the same set of tools in the first place. Than the whole work will be wasted and eventually the project will die out and we get back to the same mess.
That being said, I get that the problem they are aiming to solve is a big pain point and whoever solves it -- they deserve money, but don't deserve to keep the whole community hostage to their whims indefinitely.
Then again, if people can pay 20 bucks a month for oracle lottery tickets selling infinite wisdom one token at time, why not pay actually helpful people doing great tools.
Vite+ is a tool similar to Rust Cargo or Go's toolchain that handles building (via Vite), testing, linting and formatting.
92 requests 22.6 MB transferred 25.2 MB resources Finish: 9.54 s DOMContentLoaded: 290 ms Load: 9.50 s
Hopefully Evan can pull this off and we have simpler initial setup.
rk06•4h ago
Bun is also attempting it. Thye have made tremendous progress but they are also competing against node, and thus I don't expect to for bun to go mainstream.
However, despite the difficulties, I strongly believe that Vite+ can achieve it.
I strongly recommend all readers here to watch Vite documentary[0] that got released less than a day ago for vite's history and bacground of Vite+
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmWQqAKLgT4
norman784•3h ago
pavlov•3h ago
The sestertius isn't what it used to be.
debazel•3h ago
It was also unfortunately timed. When they started they were competing against webpack, but right around the start of the project compilers written in more performant languages like ESBuld and SWC start to take off and out compete Rome before it even got off the ground.
rk06•1h ago
Even Vite+ is focused on vite and rolldown first, and formatter last.
TheAlexLichter•1h ago
debazel•32m ago