What is Vite (and why is it so popular)?

In his most recent ViteConf keynote, Evan shared that, while Vite is making great progress, there are some known issues and challenges the project faces. As we discussed before, Vite currently uses Rollup for production builds. That’s not as fast as native bundlers like esbuild or Bun. Vite also minimizes inconsistencies between development and production environments as much as possible, but some are unavoidable given the differences between both Rollup and esbuild.