Despite all negative comments, I (and my team) switched to vite for create-react-app about two months ago, and never looked back. Builds take seconds, developer experience is amazing.a.m.a.
Is it really useless though? I wish the front end community tried to make existing things better instead of reinventing the wheel every year and causing immense fragmentation, especially for something like the build toolchain.
What annoys me about this discourse is that anybody in the front end world knows this is an issue. People aren’t contributing anything by complaining about it.
All this grunt->gulp->webpack->vite->'the inevitable replacement for vite' are really achieving is finding slightly different ways of doing the same thing.
"all this python->go are really achieving is finding slightly different ways of doing the same thing"
"all this relational db->document stores are really achieving is finding slightly different ways of doing the same thing"
This is simply a false statement. Chrome increases its dominance every year, which actually makes it a lot easier to write frontend code, but that isn't necessarily "better".
In other areas:
- Typescript has been a huge boon to the ecosystem and is widely adopted
- Babel is the standard for transpiling code and has allowed for all these compile-to-JS projects to exist
- ESBuild/SWC exist if you want to do things faster and less flexibly, but they're still a minor part of the ecosystem
We're now firmly in the age of complexity and thousands of new tools and projects - it's important that people provide a very simple introduction/overview to 'what something is'.
That said, I agree, it's not hugely helpful to have all our discussion be about that.
The app I work on deoends on an angularjs bootstrapping process, and does some other things that are sort of webpack specific, so we'd need to refactor some bits first.
Vue2 should be pretty easy, at least to see the speed improvements locally which is its main pitch afaik
I recently migrated a vue2/vue-cli project over to vue3/vite. I had a pretty clear migration path, and did it incrementally over a few months. I needed to ditch a few libraries that didn’t work with either vue3 or vite. Most of the replacements work with both (e.g. vue-composition-api or pinia) so I could keep using vue2 while I migrated and then when the last non-compatible code had been refactored a few months later the final migration was fairly straight forward. The vue-cli switch happened somewhere in the middle of this.
Yes, it has the same ability like webpack, which allow you to plug the logic you need into the system and change the results to fit your requirement.
No, the config file or the plugins isn't compatible, because it is based on rollup. So you need to find rollup plugins instead.