Changelog Master Feed Vite documentary companion pod (Changelog Interviews #661)
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Oct 8, 2025 Evan You, the visionary behind Vite and Vue.js, shares insights on his journey from Google to open source entrepreneurship. He discusses the dramatic adoption of Vite across various frameworks, emphasizing community growth and the importance of sustainable funding. Evan elaborates on the making of a documentary about Vite and the creation of his new venture, VoidZero, aimed at supporting infrastructure and a unified toolchain. He outlines challenges in open source sustainability and the hope for a replicable model, making this a must-listen for tech enthusiasts.
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Origin Story: On-The-Fly Dev Server
- Evan built the first Vite prototype in 2019 to compile Vue single-file components on-the-fly from a dev server.
- He revived the idea in 2020 once native ESM and HMR possibilities made the approach practical.
Convergence Of Tooling Approaches
- Vite and Snowpack started from opposite directions but converged in scope as browsers gained native ESM support.
- Each project solved parts of the same problem: on-demand dev compilation and dependency pre-bundling.
Skipped v1, Rewrote Into v2
- Vite v1 was Vue-centric and used middleware to handle custom file formats, so Evan rewrote it into Vite 2 with a plugin model.
- He never released v1; the project jumped straight to v2 after a complete redesign.