Unbundling the JavaScript ecosystem
There are two ways to make money: bundling, and unbundling. For a long time, the pendulum swung towards bundling. Babel, webpack, and React won the frontend battle, helping a generation of developers deliver experiences that were unthinkable before. Vertically integrated metaframeworks and services pushed this stack even further.
As usual with the Web, the pendulum swung back. SWC, and later Oxc appeared as options for Babel. Rollup and esbuild gave us alternatives to webpack. And the frameworks’ mind-share exploded and is now as diverse as it has ever been. Developers flocked to mix and match these new options, creating a variety of new stacks.
After a great unbundling, a new re-bundling process follows. However, the bundled layers evolve adapting to the next stage. As part of a new generation of tools, Vite emerged four years ago, pairing rollup and esbuild with an unbundled dev server (double entendre!).
Vite ignited an innovation spree in the frontend ecosystem. Different teams heavily collaborated and re-bundled their build tools needs. A new shared layer specially designed to fuel an explosion in new meta-frameworks exploration. Vite vanished a complete set of pain points and problems. And because of that, they have been rewarded with extraordinary growth. Vite built something new and novel, but building on the shoulders of the mature and flexible Rollup ecosystem. This greatly helped its adoption story.
