Dev Tools

If you've been living under a rock, Vite 7 just made Rolldown the default production bundler. Spoiler: my Astro 5 site went from 18 seconds to 5.6 on a clean build. Do not @ me — I timed it twice.

The Setup

Rolldown is the Rust-powered Rollup-compatible bundler the Vite team has been hinting at for two years. It's finally stable enough for production and shipping as the default in Vite 7. Rollup is still the fallback for now.

bun add -d vite@7
# nothing else to do — it's the default
bun run build

The Money Pattern

For most projects the migration is zero-config. If you want to be explicit or pin the bundler, behold:

// vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from 'vite';
import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [react()],
  build: {
    bundler: 'rolldown', // default in v7, here for clarity
    target: 'es2022',
    minify: 'oxc',       // rust minifier, also new
  },
});

Oxc as the minifier is the secret sauce. Terser is finally retired and nobody will mourn it.

The Catch

Plugin compatibility is still bumpy. Anything that relies on Rollup's internal AST shape needs a Rolldown-aware update. The big ones — Vue, React, Astro, SvelteKit — are sorted. The long tail of custom plugins is not. Check your plugins before you upgrade a production build pipeline.

The Verdict

If you're on Vite already, upgrade tonight. 3x build speedups on Netlify shave real minutes off deploy queues, and the dev-server cold start is basically instant. This is the kind of free perf you don't get often. Ship it.