The amount of JavaScript we are dealing with increased exponentially. It is not uncommon for large scale projects to contain thousands of modules. We are starting to hit a performance bottleneck for JavaScript based tooling: it can often take an unreasonably long wait (sometimes up to minutes!) to spin up a dev server, and even with HMR, file edits can take a couple seconds to be reflected in the browser. The slow feedback loop can greatly affect developers’ productivity and happiness.
Vite aims to address these issues by leveraging new advancements in the ecosystem: the availability of native ES modules in the browser, and the rise of JavaScript tools written in compile-to-native languages.