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.
They also heavily bet on community. They didn’t take- they gave. Its ecosystem is inclusive, fun, collaborative. And if history is any indicator, those are the most formidable types of communities to pursue a long-term vision.
This approach also means Vite is ending up across an incredible surface area: web applications, unit tests, server runtimes, and beyond. New opportunities to share and re-bundle are now made possible. Maybe we’ll see Vite and WebContainers powering a new type of edge runtime.
One of the benefits of StackBlitz being a solid, revenue-generating business is that we can redeploy that capital into things we have high conviction in. To date, we’ve largely done this helping Vite and its ecosystem as much as we could. We sponsored the Vite project and then hired patak, one of its main maintainers, to work full-time on Vite. Last year, we became the main sponsors of Volar. And a few months ago, we hired Ari Perkkio, a Vitest maintainer. We also hosted three ViteConf editions, the best way we found to celebrate how incredible the Vite Ecosystem is.
The next chapter
Today, we’re announcing something new- we’ve made our first investment in another company.
After proving the core idea and traction, now Evan has assembled a team to take Vite to the next level. We’re excited to welcome VoidZero. Their work in Oxc, Rolldown, Vite, and Vitest will have a profound effect on the Web ecosystem. We’re honored to be part of Vite’s story, and we’re committed to continue being an active supporter. This is a time to double down our efforts, find new ways to collaborate and ensure DX keeps improving for everybody. Our bet in Vite has never felt more prescient.
Vite doesn’t talk about performance. It delivers it.
And we love that. It’s the same thing we do at StackBlitz.
ViteConf 24 couldn’t come at a better time. See y’all this October 3rd and 4th to celebrate the future of Web Tooling! Let’s keep building together, lighting fast!
