[EvanYou]

Author of Vite here. I see many people evaluating Vite as a webpack replacement, so I want to clarify the goal of the project here:

It is NOT Vite's goal to completely replace webpack. There are probably a small number of features/capabilities that some existing webpack projects rely on that doesn't exist in Vite, but those features are in the long tail and are only needed by a small number of power users who write bespoke webpack configuration. Some of the commenters here probably belong in this group. If you do (e.g. you tried to migrate and found roadblocks, or evaluated and concluded that Vite doesn't suite your needs), use webpack by all means! You are not Vite's target audience by design - and you should absolutely pick the right tool for the job.

However, in the context of the general web dev population, 90% of existing devs and 100% of beginners don't need or care about these long tail features. This is an estimation made based on years of experience working on vue-cli, which is webpack-based. (context: I'm also the author of Vue.js and vue-cli is downloaded more than 3 million times per month on npm). Vite is optimized for these common use cases, and we've heard many success stories of painlessly moving from vue-cli/CRA to Vite.

This is also why Vite is a good fit for Repl.it where majority of its use cases overlap with the target use cases of Vite.

That said, we are also seeing frameworks like Svelte/Solid/Marko building SSR meta frameworks on top of Vite, projects that were previously webpack-based offering alternative modes running on top of Vite (e.g. Nuxt, Storybook), so we believe Vite does cover quite a lot even for power users.

So - try it, and if it doesn't work for you, stick to webpack (specially if you have an existing project relying on specific webpack behavior). As many people said, webpack 5 has made decent performance gains, and if you are targeting modern browsers, consider replacing Babel/TS with esbuild. These should already get you pretty far.

[ryansolid]

Core team on Marko and author of Solid. Vite is exactly the sort of project we've been looking for.

Sure I love coming up with the perfect Rollup setups to produce the smallest application bundles. But Vite closed the loop we were looking for in terms of offering low config client/server applications with both ease of use and great flexibility.

You can see the focus and care put into Vite to make it easier to address the complexity of configuration. We still have plugins/starter templates for Webpack and Rollup, but for the average developer getting started with these frameworks Vite just gives so much out of the box. It really gives the ease of something like Parcel, with the ability to expand. This makes it far superior to solutions like CRA which forced monkey patching or ejection.

We've already seen through meta-frameworks like Next that there is a big desire here, and what at one point seemed like a huge undertaking for a historically single developer project like Solid, is suddenly becoming a reality. And others have the ability to build and share these setups as well.

Evan and the rest of those working on Vite have my thanks and my gratitude.

[danieka]

Hi Evan!

I just wanted to thank you for your contributions to frontend development. Vue has had a huge positive impact on my day-to-day work. For me it’s truly a joy to work with and I am in debt to you and all Vue contributors. Vite makes me exited about tooling in a way that hasn’t happen in quite a while. Speed is indeed a feature.

So thank you for the great work you are doing and keep it up!

[Crazyontap]

First of all thank you for writing so many useful open-source software.

Anyway since you are here is there any reason why Vite won't run with Vue 2.x? I tried Vue 3 with Vite and I was blown away how much dev time it saves. No startup time, no compile time.. but we have thousand and thousands of line of Vue 2 that isn't going to be ported to V3 anytime soon and it kills me that I have to waste so much time looking at webpack compiling all the vue files everytime I load it.

Is this technically impossible to make Vite work with Vue 2 or is it because the community has moved away from V2 and don't want to spend any time on V2 tooling? Thanks.

[sodatea]

There's a `vite-plugin-vue2`: https://github.com/underfin/vite-plugin-vue2#vite-plugin-vue...

[lukeed]

Well said – everything new does not need to be a replacement for something else. Options/choices are good, especially because each one can lean into a different solution space.

[nojvek]

Just want to say how coincidental it is to have Evan You for vite + vue, and Evan Wallace for esbuild and Figma.

Long prosper the Evans :)

[sagacity]

It seems you are quite the Evangelist.

[robpalmer]

There is at least one more Evan working in this space who should be on that list.

Evan Martin created the Ninja build system and works on making JavaScript builds fast at Google. He has blogged about it here:

http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2020/10/scaling-typescrip...

[tomcam]

Just wait until the alpha release of EvanScript.

[nogridbag]

Evan, thanks for your work on Vite. We adopted Vite early on for a large Vue project. My main concern is the testing story. Any ETA on when we'd see official support for something like Jest?

[EvanYou]

Proper Jest integration is blocked by async transformers (https://github.com/facebook/jest/pull/9889) which should land as part of Jest 27, so we are mostly waiting on that.

In the meanwhile, you can also consider:

- @web/test-runner (https://modern-web.dev/docs/test-runner/overview/)

- Cypress (both e2e and unit testing via its component test runner https://www.cypress.io/blog/2021/04/06/introducing-the-cypre...)

- Check out https://github.com/sodatea/vite-test-example for an example using the above.

[brailsafe]

Do you mean testing Vite itself or incorporating jest for frontend stuff as a build step?

[arvinsim]

ViteJS is really faster compared to CRA that I previously used. It's really a breath of fresh air. Thanks for creating it!

Now we only need something that is in the same vein for tooling that generates libraries. I currently am using TSDX but still have a lots of problems with it.

[jimmaswell]

If someone is already comfortable with webpack or something else and has no complaints or issues with it, how would you sell them on trying vite?

[EvanYou]

At this point I don't think I really want to "sell" it to anyone. I've got enough things to maintain so I'd rather just have users who use Vite because they actually like it rather than people switching from webpack just out of FOMO.

[jabo]

I’m not related to the project, but what stood out to me is the fast reloading between changes, and the optimizations that went into making that happen. Today with webpack, sometimes changes take a full 1-2 seconds to be reflected in the browser and while that’s not terrible, having something refresh in 100s of milliseconds is a game changer at least for me and my frontend workflow.