Vite Vs Webpack

Compilers use bundlers to combine multiple JavaScript files into one executable file for browser use. The entire source code and all imported dependencies required to run your app are included in this bundle. In this article, we will look at two of the most popular bundlers: Vite and Webpack and the comparisons. Which one is better in terms of development and production time?

What Is a Bundler?

A bundler is a tool that enhances the development and production workflow by enabling seamless integration of code written in languages like Typescript or SCSS, which the browser does not support natively. It optimises and organises the code to effectively fit development and production environments.

During development, a bundler like Webpack allows for hot reloading, enabling real-time updates to the webpage as changes are made, and source maps aid in easy code debugging. On the other hand, for the production version, the bundler optimises and unifies the codebase, resulting in improved application performance.

Webpack is the most popular market bundler, backed by strong community support with millions of weekly downloads from the NPM repository. However, the emerging technology Vite is gaining traction to introduce more diversity and address bundling time concerns. Vite addresses Webpack's bundling time issue and comes with additional exciting features.

What is Webpack?

Webpack is a static module bundler. The main objective of Webpack is to combine the resources of your web project into a manageable number of files that the browser can download. This does not imply that all of your project's files will load instantly; instead, you can download them as needed.

Although Webpack can bundle non-code assets, it excels in bundling related code. It might seem like bundling combines all the code files (like JavaScript/TypeScript), but it's much more complicated.

Webpack adheres to the imports/require statements in the code only to include the necessary files when performing the bundling. It frequently performs "tree-shaking," which can remove specific code segments (such as classes and functions) that are not ever referenced. Webpack can package your projects for you very effectively in this way. However, if we compare Vue CLI (with Webpack) to Vite, we should consider what occurs during development.

Webpack During Development

Webpack is used for module bundling in the Vue CLI. This also occurs during the development phase. When you create a Vue project using the CLI, Webpack is instructed to build your project incrementally while watching for changes. This allows it to package the changed files and replace them in the browser.

Because the package is built incrementally, it can quickly incorporate changes as you work on a project. Depending on the size of the project, the initial build may take a while (3 seconds or longer). Still, once the project has been bootstrapped, incremental changes happen quickly (1 second and frequently under 100ms).

What is Vite?

Evan You, the creator and maintainer of Vue, created Vite, French for "fast," to provide a complete framework independent bundler with up to 10-100x faster compile times and a fantastic developer experience with built-in near real-time hot-reloading.

Utilising browser-native ESM support, like snowpack and preact/wmr, enables this. The modules in your app will be divided into dependencies and source code.

• Due to the low frequency of dependency changes, they are pre-bundled with https://github.com/evanw/esbuild (a JavaScript bundler written in Go); this will happen only once unless the dependency changes.
• While you are working on it, the source code will be converted into native ESM (Ecma-Script-Modules) for the browser, which only allows the browser to load files required for the current page.

Bundled Production Build of Vite

Even though native ES Modules are now supported by all major browsers, shipping an application that uses performance optimisation strategies like tree-shaking, lazy loading, and common chunk splitting still offers superior performance compared to an unbundled application.

Vite includes a pre-configured build command that uses Rollup to bundle your application. Additionally, Vite offers a sensible default Rollup configuration that you can change.

Webpack Under-the-Hood

To deliver your application, Webpack must crawl, process, and concatenate the entire JavaScript file because it is a bundler-based build tool. This is true for both your dependencies and application code. Even with HMR enabled, changes can take up to ten seconds to appear in the browser because when you save a file, Webpack rebuilds the entire JavaScript bundle. Due to Webpack's delayed feedback loop, developing large JavaScript applications will take much work for developers.

Vite Under-the-Hood

Unlike bundler-based workflows like Webpack, which must process all your JavaScript modules, Vite only processes your dependency modules before a single browser request.

Why is Vite better than Webpack?

Better performance

Vite improves performance by transforming dependencies shipped as CommonJS or UMD into native ESM (ES Modules) during pre-bundling. This conversion optimises loading times as Vite natively supports and serves ESM code by default. Moreover, Vite can combine dependencies with multiple internal modules into one module, reducing the number of requests sent simultaneously and enhancing overall page load speed.

Extensive compatibility with plugins

Vite enhances the developer experience by leveraging the Rollup plugin interface, making it compatible with a wide range of Rollup plugins. This compatibility simplifies the integration of existing plugins, streamlining the development process.

Quick updates

With Vite's native ESM-based Hot Module Replacement (HMR), updates are faster and more efficient. When changes are made to a module that accepts hot updates, Vite only needs to invalidate that specific module, regardless of the application's size. This results in quicker HMR update times, even for larger applications.

A quicker build time

Vite uses the preconfigured Rollup, a more efficient bundler than Webpack, to create apps for production. As a result, Vite's build time typically runs faster than Webpack's and produces smaller output.

Differences between Create React App and Vite

Build tools and development servers like Vite.js and Create React App (CRA) are made to make creating React applications easier. The two tools differ significantly from one another, with some functional overlap. Vite.js has some benefits over Create React App, including the following:

• Faster development server: Vite.js's native ES modules enable it to build a development server that is quicker and more efficient. This suggests that changes to the code can be viewed immediately in the browser without necessitating a full page reload. On the other hand, Webpack, which can be slower and less effective, powers CRA's development server.
• Quicker build times: Vite.js generates highly optimised production builds that utilise modern browser features like code splitting, lazy loading, and tree shaking to decrease the size of the final bundle and improve performance. This can result in noticeably quicker build times than CRA.
• Built-in TypeScript support: Vite.js includes TypeScript support, making creating projects that use TypeScript simpler.
• Streamlined configuration: Vite.js uses a user-friendly configuration format that makes the tool easy to use. In some use cases, CRA may also require more complex configurations.
  

In terms of performance, adaptability, and user-friendliness, Vite.js outperforms Create React App in several ways. However, each tool has benefits and drawbacks, and the ideal tool for a particular project will depend on its specific requirements and constraints.

Conclusion

With the most up-to-date JavaScript technologies, Vite is a new generation of JavaScript build tool that takes advantage of ES Modules' accessibility in the browser and compile-to-native bundler to provide the best developer experience possible. Vite makes your development server maintain its speed even when it handles an extensive JavaScript application; it does this by using ESM-based workflow for local development. Although popular programs like Next.js and Create React App currently use Webpack, there is a growing likelihood that Vite will become more widely embraced in the developer community due to its favourable reception and popularity among developers.