Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

The landing page of Vite claims "Next Generation Frontend Tooling" but then go on to describe features that already have been existing for a good while (multiple years).

What exactly is the "next generation" part here? The composition? That's also not new, so I think I'm either missing something very obvious, or they need to do a better job explaining how Vite is actually different.

View on HN

Vite is way faster and takes way less config. We been using it in prod for almost a year now and it's just way better. One of the few new js tools thats actually better and doesn't just exist to get stars on github and pad a resume.

> Vite is way faster and takes way less config

That sounds like "incremental improvement", not "next generation tooling". But maybe my expectations are too high.

That's a fair assessment. You could argue esbuild which it's built on is 'next generation' in terms of JS tooling, with how it integrates with ESM and HTTP2. But in practice this is basically Webpack 2.0 (not v2, but the evolution of it).

It's the performance. It's basically Webpack but fast (sub-second rather than multi-second compiles). There's a number of projects competing in this area, and it might be a bit early to call a winner, ut it's looking like it's most likely going to be Vite.

Vite bundles your app for prod, but not for dev.

While all previous ones, bundled for both dev and prod. This is what makes vite a different generation. And results in massive performance boost for dev "build" And HMR

Replying to emphasize this comment...

For dev, vite _doesn't_ bundle, it sends your site basically unmodified (as individual files) to the browser since most browsers are already capable of running anything you're using anyway... so if you change one file, that one file is patched, not the whole bundle that depended on it..

since there's no bundling, the initial start time is nearly instant...

webpack hot reload is NOTHING like this hot reload

What I think they are referring to is the bundler is built with Go/Rust rather than JS (like Webpack). The difference in speed between Webpack and any bundler built in Rust/Go (SWC, Vite, Parcel, etc) is that the latter are like 10X faster, not "this is building faster" but "how the hell did it build this quick". That difference in speed is what I think of when they refer to "next generation".

Vite is not built in Go, esbuild is. esbuild is not the only reason why it's fast either, see https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html.

Also, it does away with legacy JS imports. It doesn't use or support CommonJS without a plugin.

What exactly is the "next generation" part here?

"Native" support for modules and TypeScript, so during development there is no bundle process needed, which is usually the most time-consuming process.

Vite is a fast, efficient “bundler” for npm modules. You can run a dev environment and package code for complex, modern frameworks like svelte, vue 3, etc. It is not in itself a “framework” like React.

The next generation part is the speed. IIRC the core functionality is built in Go and it's much, much faster than competitors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com