Vite, a front-end build tool, has continued to mature and grow in popularity since we featured it in the Assess ring in the previous Radar. It is rapidly becoming the default choice among our teams when starting a new front-end project. Vite provides a set of defaults for building, bundling and managing dependencies in applications that depend on ES modules in the browser. Because it takes advantage of the native speed of esbuild and the Rollup bundler, Vite significantly improves the front-end developer experience. Moreover, when used with React, Vite offers an attractive alternative to the stalwart but nearly defunct Create React App. Vite relies on ES modules, and unlike most older tools, it doesn't provide shimming or polyfills, which means you need a different strategy for older browsers that don't support ES modules. In cases where older browsers had to be supported, some of our teams import polyfills at the module level so that Vite can be used consistently across environments.
Fast feedback is crucial for a good developer experience. Nothing breaks the flow of development more than having to wait a minute or two before getting feedback on the last code changes. Unfortunately, with applications growing in size and complexity, the popular build tools for front-end pipelines are often not fast enough anymore. Previously, we featured esbuild, which offers a significant performance improvement, because it's implemented in a compile-to-native language rather than JavaScript. Vite, which is built on top of esbuild, delivers significant improvements over other tools. It consists of two major parts: a dev server that provides rich feature enhancements over native ES modules, such as extremely fast Hot Module Replacement (HMR), and a build command that bundles your code with Rollup. Vite relies on ES modules, and unlike most older tools, it doesn't provide shimming or polyfills, which means it's not compatible with older browsers that don't support ES modules. In cases where older browsers had to be supported, some of our teams used Vite during development and other tools for production builds.
