Vite, Rust & The Future of JavaScript Tooling | Better Stack Podcast Ep. 11

In this episode, Evan You, creator of Vue.js and Vite, shares his journey from building Vite to founding VoidZero and developing a complete Rust-based JavaScript toolchain. He discusses the evolution from Vite's ESBuild+Rollup hybrid to Rolldown, the 50-100x performance gains with OXC (linter, formatter, parser), and how Vite Plus aims to simplify the entire JavaScript onboarding experience. Evan also shares his thoughts on the future of bundling vs no-build approaches, why his team chose Rust over Go, how they're using AI to ship features faster while maintaining code quality, and offers a candid take on React Server Components as a long-time skeptic who believes the trade-offs often outweigh the benefits. 🔗 Relevant Links Do we need bundlers - https://rolldown.rs/in-depth/why-bund... ❤️ More about us Radically better observability stack: https://betterstack.com/ Written tutorials: https://betterstack.com/community/ Example projects: https://github.com/BetterStackHQ 📱 Socials Twitter:   / betterstackhq   Instagram:   / betterstackhq   TikTok:   / betterstack   LinkedIn:   / betterstack   📌 Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction 1:44 - Background: Vue, Vite & VoidZero 4:13 - The Bundling Journey: From Vite to Rolldown 8:34 - Building the Rust Stack (OXC) 13:31 - VoidZero's Vision: Unified Toolchain 16:59 - Vite's Growth & The Future of Bundling 22:49 - Vite Plus Explained: Zero-Config Experience 27:56 - Open Source Sustainability 32:40 - AI in Development: Challenges & Opportunities 43:14 - AI-Aware Tooling Design 50:08 - VoidZero's AI Usage & Industry Thoughts