Vite Releases Technical Preview of Rolldown-Vite, a Rust-Based Bundler

The Vite team has released a technical preview of Rolldown-Vite, a Rust-based rewrite of the JavaScript build tool’s core, a shift in direction for one of the web’s most popular bundlers. The package is available as a drop-in replacement for the standard Vite package and is intended to gather feedback ahead of a broader integration into Vite’s core.

While still in development, early adopters are reporting dramatic performance gains, sometimes by an order of magnitude or more, pointing to a faster, more memory-efficient future for frontend builds.

Early Results Show Dramatic Speedups#

Although Rolldown-Vite is still marked as experimental, several companies and open source projects have already integrated it into their workflows with striking results:

• GitLab reduced build time from 2.5 minutes to 40 seconds and reported a 100x reduction in memory usage.
• Excalidraw dropped from 22.9s to 1.4s.
• PLAID Inc. reported a frontend build falling from 80s to 5s.
• Appwrite reduced build time from over 12 minutes to 3 minutes, with a 4x memory reduction.
• Particl saw builds fall to 6 seconds, nearly 10x faster than Vite and 29x faster than Next.js in their environment.

These claims come from the official Rolldown-Vite announcement and a related benchmark repository gathering user-submitted performance results.

Drop-In Adoption with Some Caveats#

Developers can test Rolldown-Vite by aliasing the vite dependency to rolldown-vite in their package.json, or using overrides in projects with peer dependencies like VitePress. The preview version is designed to maintain feature parity with the current Vite release, though users are advised to expect warnings, missing features, and possible compatibility issues with some plugins and frameworks.

One major architectural change is the removal of esbuild as a core dependency. With Oxc handling all transformations and minification tasks internally, plugins that rely on esbuild may need updates, or continue to include it explicitly if required.

Plugin and Ecosystem Compatibility in Progress#

To ensure ecosystem support, the Vite team has forked its CI infrastructure to test compatibility between existing frameworks, plugins, and Rolldown-Vite. While most common use cases reportedly pass these tests, plugin authors are encouraged to begin testing and updating their plugins.

The team has also published a plugin author guide to help with the transition. Some Rollup plugins may work with minimal changes, but others may require performance tuning or structural adjustments to take advantage of the new Rust-powered internals.

What's Next for Rolldown in Vite?#

Vite originally gained popularity by avoiding bundling during development, leveraging native ESM in the browser for fast startup times. However, the team acknowledges that this model doesn’t scale well for large enterprise projects.

"We’ve seen limitations of this approach for projects at unconventional scale, especially in Enterprise setups," Vue.js and Vite creator Evan You said in the announcement. "To address these, we are working on a full-bundle mode for the dev server. With Rolldown’s performance, this mode aims to improve dev server startup times, especially for large projects, while maintaining or even enhancing startup speed for small and medium projects."

You also noted that his team plans to "rustify" more of Vite’s internals to reduce communication overhead and unlock even greater performance gains.

The roadmap for full adoption of Rolldown in Vite is structured into three phases:

1. Technical Preview (now): Rolldown-Vite is distributed as a standalone npm package (rolldown-vite), collecting feedback from early adopters.
2. Merge into Core: Once stabilized, Rolldown will be integrated into the main Vite package, alongside a new full-bundle dev server mode aimed at large-scale applications.
3. Default Engine: Eventually, Rolldown and the full-bundle mode will become the default for Vite.

No firm timeline has been given for these phases, but the transition is expected to take several months and will be guided by community feedback and production testing.

Part of a Broader Rust Migration Trend#

The introduction of Rolldown-Vite reflects a broader shift in JavaScript tooling toward native implementations for performance-critical workloads. Projects like Turbopack (Vercel’s successor to Webpack), Biome (a formatter and linter forked from Rome), and Oxlint (a high-speed linter from the same team behind Rolldown) are all leveraging Rust to reduce build times, improve memory efficiency, and better scale to large codebases.

Rolldown-Vite follows this pattern by targeting bundling, one of the most resource-intensive parts of modern frontend development, and aims to bring measurable improvements in both speed and resource usage. While still in preview, its early results suggest that Rust-backed bundling could play a larger role in the evolution of frontend build systems.