Rolldown, a JavaScript/TypeScript bundler written in Rust, is currently in development by VoidZero, the maintainers of projects such as Vite. Rolldown offers a highly performant alternative to existing bundlers with full compatibility for the Rollup plugin ecosystem. Designed as the next logical step for modern build tools, Rolldown promises significant build time improvements while retaining familiar plugin interfaces. It is currently in beta.
Rolldown was developed primarily to be the underlying bundler within Vite, to replace the existing Vite dependencies of esbuild and Rollup. It is also included in the recently announced Vite+ project. A key difference between Rollup and Rolldown is that Rolldown is written in Rust and therefore it can leverage native multithreaded execution with fewer overheads than JavaScript-based tooling. According to the team behind the project, Rolldown can be 10-30 times faster than Rollup
, and a post on X from the founder of VoidZero, claims that it also beat esbuild by a large margin in their tests.
Rolldown’s API is deliberately compatible with Rollup’s plugin system, meaning most existing Rollup and Vite plugins should continue to work with minimal changes. It does however introduce features beyond Rollup’s scope, such as built in CJS support and experimental features such as advanced chunk splitting, CSS bundling, and minification. It is possible to find more about the notable Rolldown features here.
A developer over on reddit has posted their real world performance metrics based on a front-end project. They initially saw a 1.8x increase in performance by just swapping their Rollup dependency for Rolldown, and when questioned by another user about using the native plugins provided by Rolldown, the performance difference jumped to 5x. This performance metric is lower than the 10-30 times faster quoted by the package authors, however, it is worth noting that the reddit post was from May 2025, so it would likely be using an older version of the library to the one available today.
Elsewhere in the community, Justin Schroeder posted on X earlier this year an explanation of why he thinks that Rolldown might be the most important web project of the next 5-10 years
. He went on to praise Rollup for being the best and most comprehensive bundler to date
, but highlighted that performance from relying on JavaScript could be improved. The post mentions that esbuild demonstrated how a native bundler (being written in Go) could be faster, but isn’t compatible with Rollup and that is where Rolldown provides both the speed and compatibility that is needed.
Rolldown is an open-source bundler written in Rust, engineered for speed, compatibility, and next-gen bundling features. It is currently within beta, with the documentation mentioning it can already handle most production use cases
. It supports Rollup-style plugins, delivers performance gains for builds, and introduces tooling that addresses modern scaling requirements. If you’re building large-scale apps, monorepos, or frameworks and want faster builds without rewriting your plugin layer, Rolldown is a compelling choice.