Vite 8: Rolldown is here and it changes everything

The dual-bundler problem is gone

For years, Vite used esbuild for development and Rollup for production. This meant subtle differences between environments: a module that worked in dev could break in prod. Vite 8 eliminates this split entirely by replacing both with Rolldown, a Rust-based bundler that handles development and production with the same pipeline.

Full bundle mode

The headline feature is experimental full bundle mode. Instead of serving unbundled ESM during development, Vite can now bundle modules on the fly. The numbers are impressive: 3x faster dev server startup, 40% faster full reloads, and 10x fewer network requests. For large apps where unbundled dev servers start choking on thousands of modules, this is a game changer.

Built-in devtools

Vite 8 ships with an optional devtools flag that gives you a visual inspector for your module graph and transform pipeline. You can trace exactly how a file gets processed, which plugins touch it, and how long each step takes. No more guessing why a transform is slow or why a module resolves unexpectedly.

The smaller wins

@vitejs/plugin-react v6 drops Babel entirely and uses Oxc for React Refresh transforms. The install size shrinks and transform speed improves. There's also built-in tsconfig paths support, which means one less plugin to configure.

What it means

Vite has always been about developer experience. With Rolldown, it now matches or beats the performance of fully compiled toolchains while keeping the plugin ecosystem and configuration simplicity that made it popular. The JavaScript toolchain is getting rewritten in Rust, and Vite 8 is the proof that it works.