Vite and the Future of JavaScript Tooling by Evan You - GitNation

We've been thinking about what we can do to make Vite serve its role better. Vite is far from perfect in its current state. The biggest problem we saw was that Vite relied on different dependencies with overlapping duties. Vite wrapped third-party dependencies, including ES Build, Rollup, and sometimes S3C for transformation. … But as we are looking into the work on Rolldown, we started digging deeper into the stack. We realized that in order to build a bundler, we need to also pick and choose what parser we use, what AST we use, what transformer we use, what minifier we use. And when you go down the rabbit hole, you realize the challenge that Vite is facing is really a reflection of the JavaScript ecosystem at large. So, if we look into the bundler and look at all the lower-level dependencies that a bundler needs, we realize that the JS ecosystem actually suffers from fragmentation at every layer. So, for parsers, transformers, test runners, linkers, formatters, all the things that we use at every layer for every task, there are so many different solutions. And it just leads to a lot of decision fatigue. And for the average user who are just getting into JavaScript development, it's probably not the easiest task to decide which one to use. … However, there are limitations with server-side rendering that require extra code and handling of SSR flags. Vite's environment API allows for cleaner communication between the browser and server, and plugins can configure and customize specific environments. The future plans for Vite include stabilizing the environment API and integrating Rolldown Vite for faster builds. ... The environment API has potential for per-local builds and building on older versions of Node, but may not be recommended for internationalization purposes.