Vite

Vite is a front-end build tool created by Evan You (the creator of Vue), designed to give developers near-instant dev server starts and hot module replacement. It uses native ES modules and esbuild during development for speed, then bundles for production with Rollup (or Rolldown, the Rust-based successor).

How it works

• Dev server. Serves source files as native ES modules with on-demand transformation; browsers fetch each module individually.
• Hot Module Replacement (HMR). Module-level updates without page reload; usually under 100 ms.
• Production build. Bundled, tree-shaken, code-split via Rollup; outputs optimised static assets.
• Plugins. A rich plugin API compatible with Rollup plugins.

Why teams adopted it

• Dev server starts in milliseconds even on large projects, where Webpack would take 30 to 60 seconds.
• HMR is reliably fast.
• Out-of-the-box support for TypeScript, JSX, CSS modules, PostCSS, JSON, WASM, web workers.
• Default build tool for Vue 3, SvelteKit, Astro, and used by many React projects.

Rolldown

The Vite team is replacing the production Rollup bundler with Rolldown, a Rust port of Rollup's API. Goal: substantially faster production builds with the same plugin ecosystem.