Vite Creator Launches Company To Build JavaScript Toolchain

Evan You, creator of the development server Vite and the JavaScript framework Vue, is starting a new company dedicated to building a new toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem, You announced Tuesday on X.

A growing number of frontend frameworks are built on or have migrated to Vite, including Angular, Astro Qwik, Redwood, Remix, Solid and SvelteK. It was ultimately his work on Vite that led him to believe a better toolchain is needed for JavaScript.

“While Vite has greatly improved the high-level developer experience, internally, it still relies on various dependencies, with abstraction and workarounds to smooth over inconsistencies,” You wrote in a blog post on the new company’s site. “Performance-wise, it remains bottlenecked by duplicated parsing and serialization costs across different tools, and it can’t fully leverage native tooling like rebuild due to feature constraints and limited customizability.”

The decision came out of his efforts to design a new bundler called Rolldown that was tailored for Vite. As he worked on the bundler, he realized that the challenges he has with Vite are a reflection of the JavaScript ecosystem — its fragmentation, incompatibilities and inefficiencies. To change that, he contends a unified toolchain is needed.

“Over the years, many excellent tools have emerged to address the increasing scale and complexity of JavaScript applications,” he wrote. “However, the ecosystem has always been fragmented: Every application relies on a myriad of third-party dependencies, and configuring them to work well together remains one of the most daunting tasks in the development cycle.”

Defining a Toolchain

First, a few definitions. A toolchain automates software development processes by linking several software applications/tools, according to the Cloudogu glossary. Naturally, a JavaScript toolchain is a collection of tools and processes used to develop, build, test, and deploy JavaScript applications.

Typically, a software toolchain includes:

• An IDE;
• A task runner for automating repetitive tasks like compiling, listing, testing and building code;
• Build tools that bundle and optimize JavaScript code for use in production;
• Packet managers to handle dependencies and libraries.
• Liners, which analyze code for problems, testers, and debuggers.

Some examples of popular toolchains include Angular CLI, Webpack, Parcel, Rollup, and Create React App, which is a tool for setting up React projects with preconfigured tools.

You’s Toolchain Vision

You plans for his frontend development toolchain to be unified in three key ways, he wrote.

1. The tools should use the same Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), which would allow the tools to share information and avoid redundant parsing resolvers.
2. Also the tools should have a unified module interop. Module interop describes how different modules interact with each other and a unified module intro system ensures that tools can work with modules from different sources and formats.
3. The tools should also have the same resolver, he added. Resolvers are responsible for determining the location of modules, functions and variables within a JavaScript project. An example would be the required function in Node.js, which is used to load modules. Having these three factors shared across tools would eliminate inconsistencies and reduce redundant parsing costs, he wrote.

The toolchain should also be high performance, meaning they are “written in a compile-to-native language that’s designed for speed with maximum parallelization and low-overhead JS plugin support,” he wrote, adding that “the performance budget unlocks more ambitious features that improve not only developer experience but end-user experience as well.”

Each component of the toolchain should also be independently consumable, which means the tools would offer building blocks for advanced customization.

Finally, the toolchain should be runtime agnostic so that developers have the same experience across all environments, he wrote.

“Such a toolchain will not only enhance Vite but also drive significant improvements throughout the JavaScript ecosystem,” he wrote. “This is an ambitious vision, and achieving it requires a full-time, dedicated team — something that wasn’t possible under the independent sustainability model of my past projects.”

You is aware that there are practical challenges to creating a unified toolchain. The company, called VoidZero, Inc., will give him a way to work on the toolchain. It’s already raised $4.6 million in seed funding, led by the global venture capital firm Accel.

”The biggest challenge of a unified toolchain is the zero-to-one problem: It needs to gain critical mass for exponential adoption to justify continued development, but it is hard to cross the chasm before it actually fulfills that vision,” he wrote. VoidZero does not have this problem because Vite is already the fastest growing toolchain in the JavaScript ecosystem.”

So far, the company has built a team with “deep expertise in JavaScript tooling,” he wrote. They are working on the foundational elements of the toolchain and have delivered the following:

• A spec-compliant JavaScript parser (oxc-parser), which he said is three times faster than SWC;
• The Node.js-compatible resolver (oxc-resolver), which he said is 28 times faster than enhanced-resolve;
• The TypeScript / JSX transformer (oxc-transform), which he added, was four times faster than SWC;
• The linter (oxlint), which he added, was 50–100 times faster than ESLint;
• Vitest, a feature-complete test runner for web applications;
• Rolldown, a bundler built on top of Oxc. It’s faster than esbuild and all other Rust bundlers, according to You.

“While it’s still early days, our open source projects are already being used by some of the world’s leading engineering teams, including those at OpenAI (ChatGPT web client), Google, Apple, Microsoft, Visa, Shopify, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Reddit, HuggingFace, Linear, and many more,” he added.

While the existing tools — Vite, Vitest, Rolldown and Oxc — will remain open source, VoidZero will own the copyrights and control both Oxc and Rolldown, he said.

It also seems likely the new toolset will be proprietary since You wrote that “on top of our open source projects, we will offer an end-to-end JavaScript tooling solution specifically designed to meet the scale and security requirements of enterprise environments.”

What This Means for Vite

The primary goal for the company in the coming months is to stabilize Rolldown, he wrote, then make it the unified bundler for Vite in development and production. Rolldown is built on top of Oxc instead of SWC (Source-to-Source Compiler), which makes it faster than esbuild and all other Rust bundlers, You said. An alpha release of Rolldown-powered Vite is planned for later this year.

“We need a bundler that is extremely fast, well-suited for application bundling, and fully compatible with Vite’s plugin ecosystem,” he said. “Building Rolldown on top of Oxc also unlocks the ability to perform more AST-related tasks in parallel during the bundling phase, e.g., emitting and bundling its with isolatedDeclarations: true.”

Vite and Vitest’s team-based governance will remain the same, although You wrote that VoidZero employed or sponsors multiple core contributors to both Vite and Vitest.