Vite vs Webpack – Vite: The Death of Webpack?

Vite vs Webpack

Vite and Webpack both are module bundlers. Before getting into the specifics, let’s talk about Module Bundlers. A module bundler bundles all your code into a development environment to ensure that you can have the closest experience to production possible. Vite is another module bundler and does exactly what any other module bundler does, so what’s the hype around it?

Webpack and Vite are the same, Webpack traverses your app through all the files and converts the code into a development server. Vite works in a different way, it doesn’t traverse the whole app but just converts the entry page and leave the rest of the work to the browser. Webpack renders the entire code into a development environment, Vite on the other hand just converts the files/modules which are in use at that exact time.

So if you are on the login page it will only render the login page and according to the user’s response, convert the next page. This is possible because Vite forces you to use ECMAScript Modules, this is supported by browsers. Vite uses the fact that browsers support ECMAScript to make this possible. Vite uses the Esbuild bundler which is written in Golang which is significantly faster than Webpack because Webpack uses Javascript and Javascript is not a very good language for heavy computational work. You can checkout Codedamn Playgrounds as it uses Vite under the hood and if you try to create a React Playground you will notice that it uses the same ECMAScript modules.

You will also notice that it fires up very quickly as it does not compile everything in your project, but only the things that are required at that time.

If Webpack does not start making changes to their bundler it will soon get replaced by these new bundlers like Vite. Webpack is an old player so it has lots of extensions and a very large community behind them. As we have seen in the programming community it doesn’t matter how fast or how good the new library or framework is, what matters is how it is adopted by the community. Will Vite replace Webpack?

Only time will tell.