DejaVue

As a special DejaVue episode - Alex met up with with the creator of Vue, Vite and founder of VoidZero Evan You himself and discuss his new company and the vision of a unified toolchain.

Starting with how the idea of VoidZero came up and finding the right investors went, further discussion revolve around the monetization and why VC money was the way to go instead of other models, such as the sponsorship model of Vue, OpenCore or similar.

Also, we cover a lot of community questions, such as whether Next.js will support Vite in the future, what lessons Evan and team learned from other projects like Rome and when we see the first Vite version with Rolldown.

Enjoy the episode!

Chapters

  • (00:00) - Welcome to DejaVue
  • (00:26) - What is VoidZero?
  • (01:09) - When did you have the idea for VoidZero?
  • (05:16) - Limits of Vue's funding model
  • (07:10) - When did you found VoidZero?
  • (09:20) - The name VoidZero
  • (11:25) - What is open source will stay open source!
  • (11:54) - Who is on the VoidZero team?
  • (14:56) - VC Funding for VoidZero
  • (18:12) - Picking the right investors
  • (19:34) - The solved Zero to One Problem
  • (21:05) - NPM download as metric
  • (22:02) - Other company models for VoidZero
  • (28:18) - Lessons Learned from other "unified JS toolchain projects"
  • (33:21) - Feedback from framework authors
  • (34:28) - VoidZero and runtime-agnosticism
  • (37:35) - Projects close to what VoidZero should become?
  • (38:14) - Upcoming projects which will be integral for VoidZero
  • (39:50) - The Monetization of VoidZero
  • (41:55) - Monetizing a toolchain
  • (43:15) - Are planned services relevant for hobby devs?
  • (44:12) - How do you plan to divide the funds?
  • (44:50) - Vue as first class citizen
  • (48:48) - Impact of VoidZero on time for Vue and Vite
  • (55:37) - Relationship between VoidZero and UnJS
  • (56:55) - .config proposal
  • (57:39) - Migration path from tools like SWC or esbuild
  • (59:27) - When Next.js will support Vite?
  • (01:01:34) - oxc-lint and stylistic rules
  • (01:02:42) - Collaboration with the TypeScript team?
  • (01:03:04) - TypeScript Checking in VoidZero?
  • (01:03:32) - Will the formatter support Prettier?
  • (01:04:05) - License Change to Vite
  • (01:05:14) - When can we test Rolldown + Vite?
  • (01:06:30) - Hiring at VoidZero
  • (01:08:20) - Wrapping up

Links and Resources


Creators & Guests

Host
Alexander Lichter
Web Engineering Consultant • Founder • Nuxt team • Speaker
Guest
Evan You
Creator of @vuejs, @vite_js, @rolldown_rs, and more
Editor
Niki Brandner
Sound Engineer

What is DejaVue?

Welcome to DejaVue, the Vue podcast you didn't know you needed until now! Join Michael Thiessen and Alexander Lichter on a thrilling journey through the world of Vue and Nuxt.

Get ready for weekly episodes packed with insights, updates, and deep dives into everything Vue-related. From component libraries to best practices, and beyond, they've got you covered.

Alexander Lichter:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to a special episode of DejaVue. I'll talk with Evan You, the creator of Vue and Vite about his new company, VoidZero, all around that. So let's jump into it. Alright.

Alexander Lichter:

We're here at, VueFes 2024, at least very close by. And, well, with me here is the creator of Vue and Vite and the founder of VoidZero Evan You. How are you doing, Evan?

Evan You:

Good. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So, yeah, we're here to discuss, everything about your new company, the new project. It's been, quite a few weeks since you dropped the ball announcing the funding of a company.

Evan You:

Yep

Alexander Lichter:

maybe it'd be good for everyone maybe not reading the announcement blog post or the the keynotes, at ViteConf. The link is, of course, in the description for everybody out there who should, definitely do that. To summarize maybe in, like, 2 or 3 sentences what VoidZero is about.

Evan You:

Sure. So VoidZero is built on top of a few existing open source projects, namely Vite, Vitest, OXC, and Rolldown. And we our aim is to unify the vision of these projects and build a unified coherent toolchain for JavaScript and potentially, you know, associated services around that toolchain. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Well, we'll get to the services definitely later on. So maybe let's start in the past very much. When do you think, like, you had the the first idea, the first vision of what VoidZero is now and will become? Like, when any day from the big picture, let's say?

Evan You:

I would say when the when the moment we realize when I realize Vite is gaining so much traction that it's essentially become becoming a shared infrastructure layer between a lot of these different web frameworks and tools, I think this level of convergence is something that that's very rarely seen in the JavaScript ecosystem because, if there is one thing that we can summarize the JavaScript ecosystem is that it's so, you know in an active way, it's fragmented. In a good way, it's diverse. True. Right? I think it's a it's a double edged sword in many ways.

Evan You:

Mostly because JavaScript evolved from a very crude, simple scripting language to the most used language today. So people are essentially pushing it to its limits, using it to build things that it just wasn't designed for in the first place. Right? So, over that period, we need all these tools to support these expanding use cases. So people come up with these solutions 1 by 1, right, by different people at different time.

Evan You:

You know? So inevitably there are just all these incompatibilities or inconsistencies or overlapping responsibilities between all these tools. I think the nice thing about this is we essentially, you know, collectively created all the things we actually need. Right? So we do have solutions to almost every engineering problem in JavaScript today.

Evan You:

And the downside is we have to essentially, in every project, like, pull in hundreds of dependencies and try to configure them, make sure they work together, and make sure, like, you know, we actually get what we want. Right? So, I think at a so in a way, that has been the the case for, for example, the build tool. Right? In Vue CLI, we had a very long time we had to just, like we basically did the job of putting together all these things for our for Vue users and try to give them a more streamlined experience at the end.

Evan You:

And at one point, I was thinking there must be a simpler way to do this because I still found Vue CLI was a bit too over engineered, too complicated. Mhmm. Right? So Vite was in kind of like an attempt to rethink how the tool change could work for Vite in the beginning. But at a later time, halfway through working on Vite and refactoring it, I realized, okay, like, a lot of these ideas apply to it's not Vue specific anymore.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. It works for the frameworks, right?

Evan You:

Yeah. We can we can use it to to support other frameworks too and, can make things simpler for them too, right? So, I think that proved to be a really good idea because then a lot of other frameworks started adopting Vite. And, right, then then it the the trend that I talked about appeared. Like we see, like, more and more frameworks are adopting Vite and using it as the the default tool chain to build on.

Evan You:

So that's the moment I realized, like, we're onto something. Right? Like, this is, like for the first time, you see all these different frameworks are opting to use the same thing, and the magic appears because now the same Vite plugin can be used in Remix, in SvelteKit, in Nuxt, which was just not possible before. Right? So what happens if we bring this common shared infrastructure even deeper down to the whole JavaScript ecosystem?

Evan You:

Right? I think there will be more positive effects. So that is, I think that's the fundamental reason why I want to, you know, pursue this idea. And, and part of the reason why we started the company is because it's a very ambitious undertaking. Right?

Evan You:

It's true.

Alexander Lichter:

It means it's a whole thing for the the whole JavaScript ecosystem. Right? And that's also, like, we talked a lot about front end, but also all the frameworks going full stack and even taking over the back end. Like, JavaScript's everywhere, right?

Evan You:

So, yeah. So honestly, I, ironically, I don't like, as someone who's successfully made something like Vue sustainable over the years, I also know the limits of the funding model that we're using for Vue. Right? It's probably enough to sustain a few, maybe like 2 to 3 full time developers, plus we sponsor, some developers on our team to work on it in their part time. They still need a, you know, day job to support their support their living.

Evan You:

So, that's pretty much the limit of the way Vue operates, and Vue is already a very successful outlier among all the independent projects. Right?

Alexander Lichter:

Absolutely.

Evan You:

So something at the scope of a unified toolchain for JavaScript, that's not something we can do just based on donations or sponsorships.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah.

Evan You:

Right? You need buying from you either need a foundation with buying from big enterprise willing to pull a lot of resources together to make this happen, which is very difficult because, it's hard to align incentives for this between these companies, right? So the other option is we find ways to get enough money to build a team ourselves, to work on this full time.

Alexander Lichter:

And that's what kinda happened with the $4,600,000 funding you got now, from copies like Accel Yeah. From, sponsor sponsor. Sorry. From from investors like, Matt Biilmann, for example. Lots of people also you all, named them in the announcement blog post.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. But maybe also let's go a little bit back because I think the funding, it was announced earlier this month And it was secured I think like in 2023.

Evan You:

Yeah. It was actually closed last year. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So, maybe even go further back. When did you found the company that we now know as as VoidZero? Like, when did you make the step to create that company?

Evan You:

So the company was registered, I think, August 2023. Mhmm. Funding closed a few months, 1 or 2 months after that. But the first idea I think kind of started when I was in Singapore at a friend's company's kind of gathering when, some some developers who are now part, VoidZero employees, they were visiting Singapore. Visiting a friend's company in Singapore, and I was just there to hang out.

Evan You:

And we were chatting about, front end technologies and JavaScript. And so the friend who is also the the founder of the company was like, so you have Evan here, and then we also have folks who worked on some, like, projects like rspack at ByteDance. Like they work, on supporting very, like, large scale front end infrastructure projects, and they're experienced in that. And we're talking and we're talking about Vite, and how where the future JavaScript tooling is. And, you know, it just felt like, you know, there's the Vite trend, there are people who are working on similar things but also interested in the vision that Vite is pointing towards.

Evan You:

So that kind of kick started a conversation, like, maybe this can be a company. Right? Because, one thing about starting a company is you not only need the vision, but you also need the right people to build it. Definitely. So, so part of the reason why it it all came together is because I got to talk to a few people who are experts in this field and also interested in working towards this vision.

Evan You:

So, but of course, you know, if we don't have the proper funding to allow them to work on that vision full time, this would not happen.

Alexander Lichter:

That's true.

Evan You:

So that's when I started thinking about, oh, we need to raise money.

Alexander Lichter:

Makes sense.

Alexander Lichter:

So the company is named VoidZero Yeah. Did you come up with the name yourself? If you don't, like, how how did it happen?

Evan You:

Yeah. Funny enough, like, in the beginning, I was struggling picking a name. So I just, like we just temporarily called it Vite Labs.

Alexander Lichter:

Oh, okay. Like, Tailwind Labs. NuxtLabs and so on.

Evan You:

Yeah. Uh-huh. We called it Vite Labs, but, at a later stage, we discovered there was a crypto company called Vite.

Alexander Lichter:

Oh, the crypto one. Yeah.

Evan You:

The crypto company is literally called Vite Labs.

Alexander Lichter:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's tricky.

Evan You:

So it's like just a pure name conflict, and they actually have the name Vite Labs registered on GitHub, on LinkedIn. And we found out too too late, like, the so I decided to find a better name Mhmm. A different name. So VoidZero is a play on the, it's a valid JavaScript expression. If you write void 0, it evaluates to undefined.

Evan You:

Yes. Because the void operate void is in fact a keyword and an operator. So it just turns everything after it into undefined.

Alexander Lichter:

Which is a funny place, especially also instead of undefined using void 0. It's smaller.

Evan You:

Yeah. It's also, like, when you use a minifier to compress undefined, it compresses into void 0. Exactly.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. So, to my to my, opinion there are, like, ViteLabs. It feels like it's very much sticking around Vite as, like, the central tool. And while I think that VoidZero is more open Yeah. As you have now, like, you have the whole OXC, topic you have Rolldown.

Alexander Lichter:

You have Vitest. Like, you have a lot of projects under the same umbrella. Yeah. And in that way, it's like, in a way, of course, Vite is still a central piece, but it's detached, not that focused on it.

Evan You:

Exactly. Yeah. I think part of the reason of picking the new name is also because of that. Because, like, we don't want to give the people impression that, you know, the company is essentially, like, completely taking Vite and trying to commercialize Vite. That's not the point.

Evan You:

Right? We want to keep building open source, keep contributing to open source. And our monetization is not about turning Vite into a money generating machine. That's not the not the play here, right?

Alexander Lichter:

So and there, just to double down on that, I know you mentioned it a couple of times, but everything that's released right now under the open source MIT license will stay open source?

Evan You:

Of course, yes. Good. So everything that is that we maintain as open source will remain open source will remain the same license forever because, we don't ever plan to monetize based on, say, now we change the license and need to pay money to use Vite. That's not gonna happen.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. Perfect. So everybody watching now, you can be a bit more relieved. So VoidZero now, the team page came up, like, a couple days ago, like, a week, I think. So, who who's on the VoidZero team and maybe also the extended team, like, advisors, people around the ecosystem, maybe just a brief overview of the people working there.

Evan You:

Sure. So, we have internally, so we have, a sub team that's focused on oxc, of course. So there's Boshen, who's project lead, Overlook Motel, we we call him Jim. He's a bit more likes like to stay undercover, but, Jim is kind of like the optimization wizard, very deep knowledge about Rust optimizations, and, very knowledgeable. And then, Deng Qing, mostly working on the transformers.

Evan You:

He's been a very impressive contributor to the transform pipelines and also doing a lot of very like pushing out the transform features really really fast. So that's the OXC side of things. Then extended, we also have OXC contributors that we sponsor. So, Don Isaac contributes to the linker a lot. And then, we have a few more contributors that have either contributed in the past or have been making active contributions.

Evan You:

We also sponsor them. And then on the roll down side, it's mostly from, ex ByteDance folks who worked on RS Pack. So they have deep expertise in Rust bundler space. So that's one of the reasons we are confident we can actually build a bundler that is able to fulfill the needs of Vite, right? It's not easy, and it requires prior experience to that.

Evan You:

And, Boshen also kinda worked to support some of the RS pack things when when he was working at ByteDance. Right? So there's Yunfei and, Xiangjun. Xiangjun's ideas like I wanna be that guy on your hook. And then Li Kui.

Evan You:

Li Kui actually was a Vue contributor and Vite contributor That's interesting. In the past. Yeah. He was a very early Vite contributor. Was, quite, quite helpful during the Vite 2.0 interface.

Evan You:

Unfortunately, he then went to work for ByteDance and kind of, like, stopped doing open source, but now we got him back.

Alexander Lichter:

Sweet. That's a that's a nice returning story. Yeah.

Evan You:

And, and then on the on the Vite side, so we also hired a few core contributors of Vite. So Sapphi, Hiroshi, and then Vladimir, who is now the lead maintainer of Vitest, of course. Right? So I think that should cover everyone.

Alexander Lichter:

Nice. And on the adviser side, like, people that are not full time working there?

Evan You:

Right. So, we have an adviser who is, Broooooklyn, who's the author of NAPI.rs - an API, which is the way that, allows Rust and Node.js to talk to each other very nicely. So our most of our work relies on that.

Alexander Lichter:

Makes sense to have him as an advisor on board. Yes. Yeah.

Evan You:

He helps a lot on the some of the technical stuff under the hood. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Okay. Sweet. So we already talked about the business side and you mentioned why, like, funding and the business was necessary given your experience with Vite and Vue and that, let's say the open source sponsorship model doesn't, like, doesn't allow hiring just a bunch of people working full time on the vision. So then, of course, the question comes with the funding. And, of course, lots of people, reactions, like, oh, VC funding, open source.

Alexander Lichter:

We all know some horror stories there.

Evan You:

Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

And I think there are also some misconceptions out there, especially in preparation for interview. Yeah. I heard some interesting takes there. So maybe it would be just interesting to hear why you decided on taking VC money, what other options were there maybe, and especially, how you found the right investors.

Evan You:

Yeah. So, first of all, I think a lot of people are kinda allergic to hearing the term VC and Open Source combined together. But I think despite being an independent dev myself for almost like 10 years, I never look at this as a black and white problem. Right? There are successful stories of open source taking VC money, growing to successful companies, while still staying true to open source.

Evan You:

Right? I don't think that's, you know, just impossible. It can be hard to do, right? But a lot of it depends on the execution, the team, the project. It's just very case dependent, right?

Evan You:

It's not black and white. The second is, like saying for the for the idea of taking VC money, the terms and the arrangement and the power structure can vary just wildly different depending on the companies, Right? Most of the horror stories we we hear are actually companies or projects being taken over completely by private equity firms or right? So, when you give out the control entirely, then the the firm will probably try to squeeze out as much of a profit as possible. But for example, for our seed stage, right, all investors combined control less than 18% of the company.

Evan You:

So

Alexander Lichter:

And you you have the rest?

Evan You:

Yeah. Okay. Right. And then we have stock options, of course, of the team members. Yes.

Evan You:

And then the investors don't have any board seats. So we retain absolute control of the company. We retain we control the vision for all our open source efforts. Right? So in other words, it is up to me to decide whether we should, whether these open source projects will remain stay true to open source.

Evan You:

And I think in a lot of ways, it comes down to whether do you trust me to do the right thing for these projects.

Alexander Lichter:

I've seen it also a lot. People, like, are skeptical, especially with this VC part as I mentioned, but then they're also, like, oh, yeah. Evan You, the guy behind Vue Vite, he has a track record of, like, successful open source projects, and he won't do anything harming open source.

Evan You:

Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

But I think, like, mentioning the whole topic about shares and that you don't give up control is a very important part there. Just so once again, people are aware, like, hey, you are still in control, and even though, of course, the investors have some shares in that they want something else in ROI and becomes monetization also in a bit, it's it's still like your vision and in the end you also chose partners like like Accel

Evan You:

Exactly.

Alexander Lichter:

For example that align with that.

Evan You:

Totally. So we talk to obviously, during fundraising, we will talk to multiple different VCs, and we kind of instantly get a sense of whether they understand what we're trying to do, and whether they are on board with that vision, right? Some will immediately jump to sort of more direct questions like, how do you make money? How big is the market? When do you expect to be able to start making money?

Evan You:

And to be honest, like, forward, we do have a plan, right? But our plan is intentionally kind of for the long run. Like a lot of it relies on us building the right toolchain first. And we only work with partners who believe in that vision and believe the pace and the strategy that we have planned out will work. If they we will only take their money if they're okay with that.

Evan You:

Yeah. Right? So that's important in picking, picking investors. And, I guess for some companies, maybe they don't have the room or leisure to just, like, pick the investors they like the best. But for us, luckily, you know, I think we were able to just go with the investors that we see that, okay, like, they buy into the vision, they understand that, they're willing to give us the freedom and flexibility to do things our way.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

And also, like, not jumping straight to, like, okay, when can we get ROI? When when is the money there? Yeah. So that also means to tell, like, for the long run, which means not couple months, but, like, multiple years. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So as I said, you're focusing on technical part first, getting that right.

Evan You:

Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

And as you also mentioned that you had maybe the the luxury to talk with a lot of VCs that are interested, in the project, also the vision. That also comes from the the 0 to 1 problem that you don't really have to compare to former projects that also try to be a unified toolchain in a way.

Evan You:

Mhmm.

Evan You:

Yeah. I think, obviously, our, you know, the raise is based a lot on the traction of the open source project that we've already built. So it's not like we're pitching the idea out of the blue and say, we're gonna build this amazing build tool called Vite, and it's going to be the most popular thing in 2 years from now. Right? That's just, like, kind of giving promise out of thin air.

Evan You:

Like when we raise money, Vite is already on an up growing trajectory, and the trend shows that. And, you know, the year since we've raised, Vite continues to grow, and the growth just doubled in the past year. Given, like, a year ago it was already at 7,000,000 weekly downloads and now it's more than double of that.

Alexander Lichter:

Which is, like, an insane growth as well. Yeah. Even though, of course, like, download metrics always be tricky because there's a lot of legacy, but it still shows a trend. Yeah. And and also that you mentioned before, like, every modern framework except Next.

Alexander Lichter:

Js nowadays is using Vite in Yeah. In their core. Yeah. It's also showing where the ecosystem moves because Mhmm. Once again before, like, oh, yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Sure. Rollup there, webpack there, and also, like, some some systems around it, and now the unification is, in a way, already happening. It just needs to go the next step as you mentioned before.

Evan You:

Yeah. Just a point about, I see some people, like, complaining NPM downloads is useless metrics. Like, the absolute number itself doesn't really mean much, but, like, you can argue that there are, like, CI downloads, repeated downloads, improper caching, but, like, it's the same for every package on npm. Right? So if you compare the same type of packages across the same category, the relative numbers and trends still makes a lot of sense.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah, that's true. Absolutely. It's it's more like all the legacy expc... like the legacy, applications out there that might have been built with webpack and you don't do things in terms of, like, the market share. I think that's that's more of what people say. Oh, yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

That's that's a bit different, but I also don't think they're useless. It's just it's it also gives doesn't give the whole picture. Yeah. But at least it's comparable. I think that's a good point

Evan You:

there. It's mostly used to determine, to discover the trend of whether you are, you know, on an upward trajectory.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah, that makes sense. In terms of VC, have you thought about other models, besides what you did with, for example, Vue to make VoidZero happen?

Evan You:

Yeah. So my first conclusion is that the model that Vue uses is, is only scalable up to a certain threshold and is just not enough to support the amount of work that we we intend to do with VoidZero. Right? And in a way, it's also because I personally know how difficult it is to scale this model. Like, Vue grew grew over the past 10 years to the state it is now, I would say it's pretty sustainable.

Evan You:

Like, personally, I'm I would say I'm pretty financially well off just because of all the work that I did with Vue. But that's just for me. Yeah. Like, I also sponsor a number of developers out of my own pocket, but that's about it. I cannot afford to, say, hire 10 people to work on things just out of the sponsorship money.

Evan You:

And in a way, also, a toolchain is harder to monetize in the same way that Vue does. Because Vue as a framework touches interacts with developers more directly. Like this is one thing I've mentioned when I sort of try to, people ask me for advice on independent open source projects. Like the abstraction where your project sits at heavily affects your monetization strategy. So Vue, because it interacts with users so directly and it has great exposure, and makes sponsorship based, channels also, for example, endorse content or like just putting up a banner in a way.

Evan You:

Like all these things is about exposure. Yeah. And because it our documentation interacts with the users on a daily basis. And with the That's why some Yeah. That's where the conversion happens.

Evan You:

But for a dev tool, it's the conversion will be much, much lower because you sit at a lower layer. For example, if someone uses Vue with Vite, they set up Vite maybe once, and the rest of the time they mostly look at Vue documentation instead of Vue documentation. Right? So the conversion rate will also be different. So it would it will be even more difficult to make a toolchain sustainable based on the same model that Vue uses because they're just different things.

Evan You:

Yeah. Right? It's kinda similar reasons why Babel has kinda always struggled with funding despite being wildly used. You know, it's it's just like it's crazy how Babel is literally at one point the universal toolchain for JavaScript. Somehow it struggled with funding.

Alexander Lichter:

I mean, same with, like, Core. Js for example, where, like, Polyfuzz is used in so many big projects, but lots of people are not aware. And I think especially, like, end users, developers Yeah. Using, let's say, meta framework, they might know much about Vite. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So they're, oh, okay. It's using Vite. That's that's that. Yeah.

Evan You:

In a lot of ways, they're abstracted away in these end frameworks that just configures things for the users. Yeah. And the user may not even know they're using Babel in a way.

Alexander Lichter:

Exactly. I mean, I I also saw saw it for example with jiti from UnJS. Like, oh, it's used in ESLint now, but nobody knows these all these smaller packages because once again once again, they have so many dependencies as well. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

And I I definitely see where then it's very difficult to, like, get money through sponsorships. And I also remember so Nux has been part of the GitHub accelerator in the first cohort. Mhmm. And, I mean, you also gave a a presentation there and lots of people, and one of the takeaways I had there was, like, lots of people built, a course around it or, had any incentive for, like, okay, sponsor me so you get early access or here's a freemium version and so on and so on. And a lot of people tried to build a business around it because otherwise they couldn't really finance it.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. While you were in a way the odd one out, so to say, that it worked with with sponsorships. But I guess, as you said, that's because you have, like, a end user facing framework in the end that's Very popular.

Evan You:

Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

And of course not everybody can say, like, okay, I I build I build another framework and do the same.

Evan You:

Yeah. Right? In a way, Vue was able to do that because, we reached popularity first, then we started become sustainable, right? In a way for it's also kind of a chicken and egg problem. For some projects, if you don't you're not sustainable in the first place, you don't you maybe cannot even persist until the day you get popular.

Evan You:

Right? And I think yeah, so it's it's challenging. Right? So at one point I was also thinking, look, like, JS infrastructure, maybe it's, like, better suited as a foundation where, you know, you can get a bunch of companies, pull money to do it. But usually this only happens when you have, like, really big companies like Google or Mozilla or Microsoft to pull money together.

Evan You:

But, you know, the incentives behind foundations is also very complicated. It can get pulling the right strings to get them to work together to do this kind of thing usually depends on you are already the industry standard, and you are facing sustainability problems.

Alexander Lichter:

It's more like as a solution out of the sustainable problems that are already there. Like, oh, yeah, let's donate this to Foundation XYZ because you'll create a new foundation and I see. Yeah.

Evan You:

So I don't really see us in the position to say, hey, we plan to build this. We're starting a foundation. You guys should pull money to do this. I just feel like it's, compared to convincing VCs that there will be a monetization model on top of that, it's actually a more viable way compared to doing a foundation at this stage.

Alexander Lichter:

But would you think that could be, like, let's say, plan zed or, like, c or whatever solution in terms of, let's say, worst case scenario, monetization doesn't work out for whatever reason to switch to a foundation like mobile.

Evan You:

I think that's definitely on the table. Like, even at later stage, we could potentially for example, like, maybe not the best example, but, like, WordPress kind of separates?

Alexander Lichter:

Difficult right now. Yeah.

Evan You:

But not just WordPress. There are multiple companies who put the open source projects in a foundation, but then have a for profit business entity

Alexander Lichter:

Yes.

Evan You:

Sort of leading and supporting the foundation. That model is possible. But at at this stage, we're just focused on trying to get the monetization working first.

Alexander Lichter:

Of course. That totally makes sense. And you already mentioned there were there were quite some projects who got popular, like, after being or, like, popular and then sustainable. Mhmm. Other projects tried to do the same and failed.

Alexander Lichter:

Now especially in the unified toolchain

Evan You:

Mhmm.

Alexander Lichter:

Category, let's say, there are a few that, of course, tried it. Like, VoidZero is not the first attempt.

Evan You:

Mhmm.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. So, of course, Rome is a Is a very good example. But also to some degree, at least what Bonn is trying to do, like, the runtime part of it maybe.

Alexander Lichter:

Could you outline differences, maybe also learnings from some of the projects that failed or still exist, and what you do differently?

Evan You:

Yeah. Sure. So, first off with Rome, I'll have to be a bit direct here. I'm not criticizing specific people involved in the project, but I think, it went some detour. 1st, Roam was started as a JavaScript based implementation.

Evan You:

They essentially gave up halfway and decided to rewrite everything in Rust. So that was already a lot of wasted time and energy, right? So by the time they they started rewriting everything in Rust, they are back to ground with 0 adoption, with nothing implemented. So this reimplemented the parser from the ground up and got finally got to the way of implementing a formatter, right?

Evan You:

So that was the first usable thing that Rome produced. The thing about a formatter is it's easily adaptable, so it's good to kind of validate your thing and get people using it. However, in my opinion, flow matter is something with the lowest moat in terms of it's it's kind of detached from everything else from your build stack. Yeah. It's like I can switch your flow matter anytime without incurring much thought.

Evan You:

It's like I switch from Prettier to Biome today. It's easy. It's simple. It doesn't really involve anything else.

Alexander Lichter:

Not not high cost as well.

Evan You:

Yeah. Which means if there is a better formatter coming up one day, I would have no problem switching Biomout for that formatter. Right? So it's not really it's not going to let's say you're building a company and you want people to keep using your stuff. The format really isn't the best thing to keep them

Alexander Lichter:

Yes.

Evan You:

For that purpose. Right? So so they, they did not get to build the, the rest of the thing mostly because of operational issues. Honestly, I don't think it's they they didn't even get to the part where they even started attempting to make money. Right?

Evan You:

So the company kind of folded before they got to that part. Yep. And it's not because that the idea of a unified toolchain is wrong. I think it's mostly the execution. Right?

Evan You:

So, it's unfortunate that the that the company folded, but, it's really, like, the same idea carried out by a different group of people can have very different results.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. I mean, ideas are cheap, right? It's about execution in the end. Yeah.

Evan You:

It's true. There's no direct correlation between, like, oh, because they did it and failed, like, no one else can do it. Right?

Alexander Lichter:

So Especially as a lot of people want that unified toolchain. I mean, people from other programming languages are laughing at JavaScript, like, oh, you don't have, like, cargo, like, a Rust, and, like, Yeah. So, I think that the demand is definitely there for sure. Yeah. But, yeah, it's a good point that, like, also there the let's say the difficult part and also the sustainability part Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Wasn't fully reached if I'm yes.

Evan You:

So I think one part is, you know, the company, it just, like, imploded. The other side of it is, the adoption profile of a formatter is just not a good entry point, in my opinion. Like, there are I think it also depends on the specific ecosystem. Right? So if you build a successful formatter and you follow-up with other successful thing, it may also work out.

Evan You:

Right? For example, I think Astral is doing the this for the Python ecosystem. Mhmm. Right? They build ruff, which is wildly successful, but then they got into uv, which is package management.

Evan You:

Like, because the formatter is good for spreading awareness. Right?

Alexander Lichter:

But you have to follow-up also very quickly. Yeah.

Evan You:

You have to follow-up with something that's more concrete, that solves more, more critical problems Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

In the tool chain.

Evan You:

Just formatting. Yeah. Yeah. Right? But compare that to VoidZero.

Evan You:

Right? We have Vite. And Vite is already solving a critical problem for a lot of people. Yeah. Right?

Evan You:

So, in a way, we have already crossed that 0 to 1 stage. Like, if we can enhance Vite with this new toolchain we're building, we have no problem with getting it into hands of millions of developers.

Alexander Lichter:

You could already use it. Yeah. It's not like we have to gather the users. It's like, Here's a new update. You go for it.

Evan You:

-Yeah. So we're we don't have to worry about like, Hey, here's a brand new Rust toolchain. Can you try it, please? Right? In a way, like, we, we don't have to worry about that.

Evan You:

We can focus on just building the best thing possible.

Alexander Lichter:

And I mean, you also have a lot of people being able to test it as well. Yeah. I get feedback. I think that's also another part of, like, not only adoption, but get the whole framework together and say, like, okay.

Evan You:

Exactly.

Alexander Lichter:

This is what we need or doesn't work or could improve. So, like, also a lot of opinion can sometimes also be bad, but it's better having, like, a lot of people testing it and giving feedback.

Evan You:

Totally. One of the strengths of the Vite ecosystem is we have this kind of very close collaboration relationships with all the teams that are building on top of it. I talked to a lot of the stakeholders before I started the company, you know, and make sure everyone is aware that we plan to do this. Yes. Right?

Evan You:

So in the long run, I think, they're on board with it because in the long run, it benefits their framework too.

Alexander Lichter:

Right? So everybody was, like, mostly positive saying, hey, good idea.

Evan You:

Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So that's also nice to, like, get not saying approval, but, like, just, let's say, it's just temperature gauge of, like, what people think about it

Evan You:

Yeah. Beforehand. And especially because you don't wanna step on anyone's toes saying, oh, now framework XYZ might switch to whatever or build their own things Yeah. Because of that. So that's, well, definitely a good move, I would say. In terms of runtime, you said that VoidZero should be runtime agnostic.

Evan You:

Yep.

Alexander Lichter:

So how do you how do you compare it to something that BUN is doing, which, like, also they are, like, all in one toolchain to to some degree.

Evan You:

Yeah. So I think the positioning here is, our goal is to build a toolchain that solves your problems in a way that would benefit you regardless of the framework you're using or the deployment targets you want to use. Right? So as long as you are doing JavaScript, there is a way for you to benefit from the things that we build. Whereas I think for Bun and Deno they're fundamentally runtimes.

Evan You:

So in a way the development experience or the toolchains integrated with the runtime is their way of offering more features or better development experience in order to get traction to convert users from Node. Js to use these different runtimes, right? So the the purpose is a is a bit different, Right? Because, if I'm not mistaken, the ultimate monetization strategy for both Deno and Bun is to make people pay for hosting services to run Deno or Bun.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. Like Oven, Deploy, and so on.

Evan You:

Yeah. So their bet kinda hinges upon, that people switching away from Node.js, their runtime end up being the winner in the ecosystem, and naturally they wouldn't want their toolchain to be easily usable without actually using the runtime, which means every all the toolchain used in Bun is coupled to Bun, right? So let's say you want to build your own analyzer for a very customized use case. OXC is a full list of crates that you can just pull out in your Rust projects, or we even have node packages.

Evan You:

Mhmm. Right? You can use OXC resolver, you can you can use OXC transform, OXC parser, and standalone node packages as well. Nothing prevents you from doing that, right? But and you would get the same behavior when you're opting to the whole thing together.

Evan You:

Yeah. Right? So it's like it's kinda like, a la carte. Like, you have individual pieces, or you opt in to the whole thing. It's kinda like the same progressive framework idea that Vue kind of did.

Alexander Lichter:

Makes sense.

Evan You:

Yep. Whereas, if you use Bun, you kind of you're opting into the whole box of things. Right? You wanna stay in Bun as much as possible, and that's what Bun wants you to do. Of course.

Alexander Lichter:

Like, it's in a way also vendor lock and just from the runtime side in the end.

Evan You:

Yeah. And I think strategically, nothing wrong for Bun to do that because that's their whole value proposition. Yeah. Sure. But our, you know, our starting point is just different.

Alexander Lichter:

And would you say there might be a way to be like, let's say compatible with whatever fun, demo, and so on and so on plan to do?

Evan You:

I think there are definitely good opportunities for, for example, if a runtime wants to leverage our tool chain to power their offerings Mhmm. We're open to that. Yeah. Right? I don't think that's gonna happen for fun.

Evan You:

Right? But maybe for other runtimes. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So the the chances there is probably just like, okay, talk and using it. And, okay, that's nice. So one like, there were a lot of questions, of course, for the community, and one of them is, is there a project that is, let's say, that exists right now and is the closest to what you imagine VoidZero would become one day?

Evan You:

I would say not. I don't think there is something that's very closely equivalent to what we have. The end goal that we have in mind.

Alexander Lichter:

Maybe in other languages besides JavaScript?

Evan You:

Oh, you mean just if if you're just talking about the toolchain part

Alexander Lichter:

I would say in general. Yeah.

Evan You:

Yeah. Like cargo for Rust. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So that's that's so so is it the cargo for JavaScript? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's not too bad.

Alexander Lichter:

It's a catchy phrase. And are there any upcoming projects that can be closed source or open source that don't exist right now or that nobody's aware of? And that should be or will be integral for VoidZero? So beyond the projects we have under the VoidZero umbrella right now.

Evan You:

Yeah. So obviously the long term plans will likely change, but I think in general if it's something that we distribute to users to run on your machine, it will likely be open source and free to use, right? If it's a paid thing, it will likely be hosted somewhere as a service.

Alexander Lichter:

Okay. That that makes sense. So everything that's like closed source will probably not land and the end users will change.

Evan You:

Closed source will, like because obviously in the early stages of the company, we explored a lot of we discussed and explored all these different options. Right? So, I guess I don't want to lock myself into a box right now because the road is long.

Alexander Lichter:

True.

Evan You:

But I like, honestly, like, open core, I don't think we it's unlikely that we go with open core. Join the line of arbitrary feature sets is just very difficult, especially for the kind of thing we do. Right? We don't want to create artificial barriers for people, of adopting and using the things we build, and especially if it's, you know, it's we're building something for the ecosystem. Right?

Evan You:

So the ideal situation is the services that we build generate sustainable income for us to keep the toolchain free and open source forever.

Alexander Lichter:

Got it. And then you point already, now we come to the topic that was the most asked question, of course, monetization. Like, the big thing, under your announcement tweet, under videos, under literally everything, also the the q and a tweet and post, like, oh, how will VoidZero make money? What's the the business model and so on and so on. Maybe to start on that you said in your Narsa blog post it will be focused on enterprise, so like solutions for enterprise.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. Can you like outline a bit more on that? I mean you said you have to be still a bit vague. Yeah. But I'm more than sure that people are curious to hear everything around that.

Evan You:

Yeah. The idea here is when we build a universal toolchain, and assuming it becomes industry standard, it gives us great funnel, great conversion, for literally any service that we build. Right? So, unfortunately, I cannot go into the very specific details about what exact service we plan to build because, in a way, we don't want to, like, reveal it before it's actually ready. It ties into a lot of, you know, the the business side of things, strategies, like

Alexander Lichter:

Sure. Competition. Yeah.

Evan You:

Potential competition and everything. Right? But so first thing we wanna assure people is we do have a plan. The second thing is, if the plan goes well or, like, even if the plan doesn't goes well, like, our bottom line is we want to retain the integrity of the open source efforts that we do. Right?

Evan You:

I think a lot of the reason people are curious about the money making part is, like, they worry about the long term sustainability or, like, whether we will because of the money making incentives, whether it will distort the open source parts. Right? So one promise we can make is we'll never try to make money by switching licenses and force you to pay for something you're using for free today. That's just not going to happen, right?

Evan You:

Everything we do is going to be value added on top. You opt into it, if you like it, you use it, you pay for it.

Alexander Lichter:

I think, like, especially, at least, my feeling is that a lot of people have trouble on, like, imagining how they will look like with a toolchain because let's say, in our example, Laravel Cloud got funding recently, also from Accel, of course, and it's like, okay, it's a product, users can can subscribe, buy, whatsoever. It's rather clear. So as you said, there will be services, that's that's what you can that's what you can share.

Evan You:

Yeah. I think if we make an analogy, right, for Laravel, Laravel is the open source framework, and then Laravel Cloud is a service that you can potentially pay for, right? And many other Laravel services that you can pay for, right? Some close examples, I think it's actually pretty common, like NX, has NX Cloud.

Alexander Lichter:

Mhmm.

Evan You:

Bit has BitCloud. They all have an open source component that you can use for free and get a certain level of benefits, right? And then it's enhanced when you combine it with a cloud service that you use, right? So I think there are plenty of opportunities when you have a full toolchain that covers all the aspects of your JavaScript development to build something like that. Right?

Alexander Lichter:

And it probably also something to explore as well to see, like, okay, what's what's possible, what's interesting as well for the enterprise customers. But would you say, like, let's say, a hobby developer having, like, a side project would also be up to use these services? Or is it, like, let's say pricing tier wise would be more catered towards enterprise?

Evan You:

I think most of the concerns we do plan to cover and monetize on probably applies more to enterprise environments or medium sized and up production oriented teams. Like you have real products, that you have, you know, software engineering quality concerns. Essentially something that you deploy in production and you're actually making money with it. Like it's a serious thing and you want to make sure it's you you deliver code more efficiently, better, more securely, you know.

Alexander Lichter:

So it's it's more like that the developer who has, like, a side project might not even need these services.

Evan You:

Yeah. You probably don't need these services, but you can still enjoy the open source things we build.

Alexander Lichter:

Totally. Yeah. Nice. So to keep VoidZero sustainable in a way, how do you roughly think about dividing the efforts and also funds? So you mentioned, like, sponsoring other projects.

Alexander Lichter:

You hired some people from the the Vite the Vitest, the rspack uhh, the oxc team, who worked on rspack before.

Evan You:

Mhmm.

Alexander Lichter:

So are there, like, any strategies how to continue doing that or how to, advance that?

Evan You:

I think sponsorship is just a natural part of it because we do get value out of the all the people who contribute to our projects, right? So it's just natural we need to do that as part of the responsibility of a company that's built on top of open source. I think long term we'll you know we the people who are maintaining these open source projects today will likely keep doing that. Right? We will have separate product development but you know, because for us, in order to make people trust our products and use our products in the future, the premise is built on we build good open source projects first.

Evan You:

Yeah. Right? That's the whole strategy. That's the whole idea is to make our open source things stuff so good that everyone wants to use them, and then, you know, that becomes our conversion base for the paid product.

Alexander Lichter:

Got it. And, I mean, then as I said, like, sponsoring and, like, further improving open source is also part of it.

Evan You:

I think all the incentives just align. Yes. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Let's talk a bit about VoidZero and Vue because you you mentioned Vue also in the FAQ, the mini FAQ of the Announcement blog post. You said that Vue will be a first class citizen of, like, VoidZero of the projects in there. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit as what that exactly means for Vue?

Evan You:

So for Vue, Vue remains independent projects. Business aspect, in the business sense it has nothing to do with VoidZero. But Vue's default build toolchain is based on Vite. So anything that VoidZero does to enhance Vite naturally benefits Vue users as well. Right?

Evan You:

So for me I try tend to view tend to think of Vue as a framework, as a vertical experience, which means if I'm working on something that even if it's at a lower level, as long as it benefits Vue end users, right, that's also, like, it's contributing to Vue in a way. Mhmm. Right? So and that's part of the reason why I built Vue. Right?

Evan You:

I built Vue to make the Vue development experience better, and I think that actually did. Right? You know?

Alexander Lichter:

Absolutely. Yes. Sure.

Evan You:

So I believe what VoidZero is doing will also make Vue development experience better.

Alexander Lichter:

Yes. But, it's not like it will only make Vue experience better or

Evan You:

It will it will make everyone's development experience better.

Alexander Lichter:

So would you say that it's like, because you said, like, you will be a 1st class citizen just means it won't be a 2nd class citizen? As in, like, it will

Evan You:

So for example, if, there are certain things we need to do to ensure the new things we build are compatible with the Vue plugin, or making sure like when we release a new version we will always ensure Vue works smoothly with everything we've released. And the other aspect of it is there are a lot of AST manipulation and code generation things involved in the Vue compiler path.

Alexander Lichter:

Yes.

Evan You:

Right? Some of those might be suitable for opting into the new tool chain. For example, we can use OXC's parser to do some of the parsing that we need to do in the Vue compiler.

Alexander Lichter:

Mhmm.

Evan You:

And if we provide more powerful primitives for doing transforms, we can use that in the Vite Vue plug in.

Alexander Lichter:

Experimenting field as well. It's like, okay, we have our new primitives, we have new functions, let's try them out. Like, also, you did with with Rolldown already, for example.

Evan You:

Yeah. Like, for, we do actually, for example, like, I used VitePress as kind of testing bed for a lot of Vite features doing the 2.0 rewrite. We're likely gonna do that for the Rodan Vite as well. In fact, our Vite's documentation already can run the VitePress build using Rolldown powered Vite.

Alexander Lichter:

Nice. That's that's a great achievement. Yeah. Sweet. So now with with another project and it's not, let's say, Oni, Oni is wrong there, but open source, it's a company, so a business.

Alexander Lichter:

How do you think that will maybe affect your, let's say, attention and time for Vue but also for Vue? Because you have Rolldown, of course, you have everything everything under the VoidZero umbrella, so to say.

Evan You:

So, I think naturally with the team growing, I think there are it's a role, you know, a transition of role for me. Like, I think even within Vue, I kind of have transitioned a lot from pretty much handling everything hands on to encouraging more team members to contribute. Like, in fact, if you look at the latest commits in Vue core, we have consistently have new active contributors joining. And a lot of times in a in a especially in patch releases, I maybe only do 1 or 2 commits during a patch where the other, like, 8 to 10, a dozen commits from other contributors. Mhmm.

Evan You:

Right? So, in a way, I want to not only do that to for Vue but also for Vite. In fact, Vite is already mostly team driven. Look at the commits. I actually don't write much code for Vite directly anymore.

Evan You:

So for me I think part of the reason we're able to grow Vue and Vite into successful team projects, I don't want to like brag about it myself but I think I have a knack for identifying good contributors and try to, encourage them to grow into bigger roles. Yeah. Right? And I think I wanna do that more at the company level. Like, we want to identify people who are passionate about these projects, give them the room to grow, to step into bigger roles.

Evan You:

Because I'm just one person. The best way to scale, what's in my brain is for me to be able to focus on high level directions, the big picture, and then finding the right people and put them in the roles that can sort of help me carry out that vision.

Alexander Lichter:

Because of delegating that, like, how to

Evan You:

Yeah. Learning to delegate as a as a company founder. I think that's critical, and that's something, you know, I'm I'm learning and trying to do more.

Alexander Lichter:

I think also in open source, as you mentioned, it's it's the same idea. Right? You can't do everything alone. Like, you have to have people try aging docs. And it's it's so much and, especially at a certain popularity level, like, in in Vue and Indeed, it it wouldn't work.

Alexander Lichter:

And if if you look at, if you have a look at the Vite team, if you have a look at the the Vue team, then that that works out pretty well. Yeah. So, yeah, I think at, company level, this is at least something that is similar. Of course, different because there's still product, there's still business at some point behind it. But it's, yeah, it's kinda similar as well.

Evan You:

I think I want to be able to use my time in the most valuable way possible. I think, in fact, like I never consider myself the strongest in terms of raw technical skills, like like implementing a hard algorithm or doing some crazy optimizations. Like, I can do that, but I'm not probably not even the best engineers do that kind of stuff, you know? I think my, kind of natural talent is probably in just, like, designing sensible APIs and finding good trade offs and defaults and to give the end users the best possible developer experience without compromising on the technical vision. Right?

Evan You:

So balancing all that is, I think, the best way to spend my energy at the moment. So, and then that also means it's a similar case for Vue. So I want to be 100% honest because like starting a company definitely will reduce my attention that's allocatable to Vue to some extent, right? But doesn't mean Vue's gonna be abandoned, right? So given my, you know, as much attention I can give it to it, I will still make sure Vue evolves in a way that I see that's beneficial to the users.

Alexander Lichter:

Would you say that the amount of attention you can, give to Vue is, like, comparable to, let's say, when you worked on Vite before or, like?

Evan You:

Yeah I would say it's comparable. In fact I think during the Vite 2.0 phase I pretty much just like left Vue aside.

Alexander Lichter:

So you wouldn't say that would happen again?

Evan You:

I think right now I try to be more consistent. Because in a way, I think also, like, I want to be kind of, you know, open about it. The idea here that an open source project needs like, I think if it's just bug fixes, right, you do need constant attention, like small things coming in, you can fix it as they come. But I think, for for a project like Vue, right, it's stable, it's already fulfilling a lot of needs. In a way, we are not really looking to do really disruptive paradigm shift kind of changes in view.

Evan You:

Yeah. At least for the foreseeable future. Right? Our focus is on incrementally improving everything, whether it be it's small quality of life improvements, making sure an old API works better in certain ways, or, addressing some long standing issues, or just like rewriting the internals to make it faster without you having to do anything. Right?

Evan You:

We're focusing on these kind of things. And in a lot of ways, because I think Vue's status as an independent project and not a for profit one, actually affords us to take a pace that's different from a for profit thing. Like when you see a framework that's being used as a funnel for a for profit project, you naturally see you need to constantly be pushing for new things, keep it on the radar, and make people excited all the time. In a way, we maybe we have to do that for the new toolchain, but I think for Vue, we're not an on on a real pressure to do that, and I think that's fine. Like, in fact, I think for a lot of independent open source projects, it's fine for it to for every single one of them to have different tastes of their own.

Evan You:

You can move as fast as you want, or you can move slow as long as you believe you are doing your users right. Right? And I think for a framework that's 10 years old, you don't necessarily want new big features coming out every month.

Alexander Lichter:

No.

Evan You:

It's actually tiring.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. Also for the users, right? Like, also, I mean, Vue 2 video free, of course, wasn't the easiest and, like, having something that big of a change again would probably also hurt the user base as well, especially if there's no need to that.

Alexander Lichter:

So that that definitely makes sense. Okay. Let's come to a bunch of questions gathered from the community here and there. So a few people asked what's the relationship to the UnJS project? Because also unified JavaScript system.

Alexander Lichter:

Right. Maybe potential collaboration, even people like, oh, they're merging. So what's what's your take on that?

Evan You:

There isn't really a direct relationship. I think on JS is more at the runtime level. It's like runtime libraries, for example, like Nitro is basically. Poyaa's actually, the new project is like a unified server API, right? So this is more code that actually runs at run time.

Evan You:

So VoidZero concerns more at the the build, transform, and infrastructure tooling layer. So it's like language level support rather than just, very specific things you wanna do at runtime. Right? I think UnJS is more focused on the run time part. I think maybe jiti is a bit kind of related.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah.

Evan You:

So I think, you know, at one point, jiti probably should use RxC and Rota under the hood. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Let's let's see what we can do there. Yeah.

Evan You:

I mean, but other than that I think, UnJS is, like, sitting at the runtime layer whereas 40 is, like, at the language toolchain. Absolutely. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Have you heard of the dot config directory proposal also from Pooya to select, hey, all the configs? Do you think that's something that also a unified toolchain could support?

Evan You:

I mean, of course, if we, end up having a toolchain that covers all these concerns, it will probably just be one single config file.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah. Or, like, even the that, like, a dot config folder to just, like, put, I don't know, your post CSS config in there, your, you know, tailwind config and whatnot, so you don't have to have it all at the top level project root?

Evan You:

Yeah. I guess dot config works well as is now. I'm not sure if it needs to be part of the VoidZero scope. Right? But for VoidZero, everything that we do cover

Evan You:

Mhmm.

Evan You:

It will probably just be configurable in one single config file.

Alexander Lichter:

Do you plan migration paths, ideally smooth migration paths for, for other tools, people use like SWC, esbuild, and so on and so on?

Evan You:

Rolldown actually is, specifically in terms of scope, is very similar to esbuild, so I think in a lot of cases, Rolldown's API is designed more modeled after rollups, but feature set wise it's very close to esbuild. Mhmm. So if you want, you can definitely migrate from esbuild to to Rolldown. In fact, we do have a client that we're working with. He's specifically doing that because they want better chunking control, which esbuild has kind of a limitation with.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah.

Evan You:

And for, what's the, SWC? I think for SWC, if you're using it as a transformer the migration should also be quite straightforward because both of both OXC's transform and SWC's transform are, like, loosely modeled after Babel's. Mhmm. Right? So the options will be similar.

Evan You:

The functionality will be similar. It will just be probably faster. So I don't also don't see a big problem there, and SWC also doesn't really have a bundler associated with it. I mean, there's turbopack and rspack, but they're not in the scope of SWC, right? So, yeah, I think, if you want to just use oxc instead of SWC as a parser or transformer, it should also be doable.

Evan You:

In fact, there is a project that's doing that, which I cannot really tell you what it is now, but, at a later stage, you will know.

Alexander Lichter:

Perfect. Great. I'll definitely retweet that as soon as you you announce it.

Evan You:

Okay. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Let's see. Okay. Cheeky question. When Next. Js will support Vite?

Alexander Lichter:

Probably never.

Evan You:

Mostly because, it's so hard, so deeply integrated with turbopack, so it's just too deeply invested in that. I think we actually once did a prototype of running Next.js on Vite, and we got to the point where we can run the approuter playground with, like, 80% of the features working exactly the same. The same code base, we just aliased it with something else. That's and it gets it gets running on Vite.

Evan You:

But the internal differences are huge. At one point, I think it's just not really worth it on our side to pursue it further. And we, we did talk to Vercel about it, but they don't really seem that enthusiastic about it.

Alexander Lichter:

It's their own tool in the pipeline. Yeah.

Evan You:

It's understandable because, like, the they've invested so much into Turbopack. Yeah. Right? I think for them really it's, like, they just want to get it to Turbopack to work nicely through next.

Alexander Lichter:

Fair. But do you think that could, well, be a downside that, like, Next.js is the only bigger framework that's not and then also on the unified toolchain?

Evan You:

I mean, for Next.js probably is going to be a downside in the long run. Like, I think for the the competitive advantage of other frameworks being built on top of it is they keep getting the benefits of everything we've built under hood for free.

Alexander Lichter:

For free

Evan You:

Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. But I mean Vercel has a lot of money, so they invest into their own things.

Evan You:

Fair. Which they have more control over.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah, that's a benefit for them, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Evan You:

Because a lot of the Next.js internal logic is now like, a lot of the Next. Js specific transformers are coupled with SWC. So they were able to do that because they, you know, control all the way down to SWC. And and I think for them at that time it was, you know, it was the only option because, you know, Vite really didn't have this kind of native toolchain back then.

Alexander Lichter:

Fair. oxc-lint, will oxc-lint support statistic rules? After we heard, like, oh, ESLint shouldn't be used for stylistic rules, Anthony Fu has now adopted all the stylistic rules there. What's your take on that?

Evan You:

I think the current focus scope of oxc-lint is pretty much artificial. It's mostly because, the scope we want to control the scope because the linker is not our primary focus right now. Mhmm. But, you know, at a later stage, eventually, we want the tool change to be as complete as possible. So if stylistic rules I think it kinda depends on demand.

Evan You:

Like, if we as more people start using oxc-lint and a lot of users are asking for stylistic rules, then, of course, that can be put on the road map. But I think the bigger problem we wanna tackle is, performant type-aware linting, which is something we have discussed with the TypeScript team. And, again, there are things I cannot talk about just yet. Yeah. But I think there will be interesting development in the future.

Evan You:

I'm looking forward to that. Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

So you also collaborated with the TypeScript team with Microsoft in that way?

Evan You:

I wouldn't say it's collaboration, but we are in a very close, you know, our The exchange. Yeah. We talk about the plans, making sure we don't, you know, collide or making sure it's compatible, making sure, like, we're not doing duplicated work.

Alexander Lichter:

Yeah.

Evan You:

Yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Also when it comes to TypeScript checking itself, you always said it's more of an out of band, thing to do and that probably won't change for a while.

Evan You:

That won't change because because making TypeScript check type checking faster is a task that can only be achieved by the TypeScript team themselves.

Alexander Lichter:

So they should rewrite it to Rust, I see. No. Who knows, but, this could be interesting. So in terms of formatting, people of course have very strong opinions what to use. Prettier is very popular. Will you just comply with the Prettier rules? Will you give some more customization, so like whatever that's up to the end user?

Evan You:

I think the first version will likely just be a 1 to 1 Prettier compatible. Yeah. Because, the the thing is formatting is naturally a bikeshedding topic. Right? Like we don't really want to spend our energy on bikeshedding for the users.

Alexander Lichter:

They're more interesting.

Evan You:

Prettier has already done that. Let's just let's just do that.

Alexander Lichter:

That's true. Remember what they did. Yes. Okay then, 2 more. One, that was quite interesting.

Alexander Lichter:

So I saw there was a pull request, number #18278 in Vite, from you that changed the license. Uh-huh. But to be fair, not like the license type, it's still MIT but they changed from your name to VoidZero inc. Could you briefly, explain why it happened?

Evan You:

So I basically assigned the copyright that I previously owned, in Vite, to VoidZero, the company. And, like That's it.

Alexander Lichter:

Why that?

Evan You:

Well so that the company is now more, has better reasons to sponsor Vite's development. Because otherwise it's my project technically, and it would be more like the company sponsoring a project that's actually controlled by me, where although I control the company, right?

Evan You:

Legality wise, it's a bit of a gray area.

Alexander Lichter:

So it's more of a legal point of view.

Evan You:

Yeah. So assigning into the into assigning the copyright, so basically the majority copyright of Vite to the company, which means it's reasonable for the company to spend money on its further development?

Alexander Lichter:

Yep. That makes sense. And then, the last one is when can we see a first version of Vite and rolldown?

Evan You:

Well, there is in fact already a continuous release that's available through pkg.pr.new. We do we currently have a fork in rolldown/vite repository. If you're interested you can check it out. It can already run most of the starter kits for, from the create Vite templates.

Evan You:

There are still rough edge some rough edges, like consistent issues and, resolver. So it actually already works to a certain extent, but there are some parts that we want to make more efficient, essentially. And some of that is kind of blocked by Rolldown, some of that just like Rust and JS drops. So some rough edges we need to iron out. I think we are trying to get some of the simple React SPAs in production to try to use it.

Evan You:

But my hope is end of this year or early next year we will have something more like, alpha or beta version that you can actually test in your project.

Alexander Lichter:

Sweet. Then very last question about hiring. So On your website, on VoidZero, it said, like, you're hiring not for an like, not for an active position but whoever is, let's say, interested in low level, ideally experience with Rust, but also the vision of the big unified ctoolhain can apply.

Evan You:

In fact what we said is we're not hiring.

Alexander Lichter:

Yes. No. You're not hiring for any position. Right? No.

Alexander Lichter:

But you could still send something over if you think that fits.

Evan You:

So essentially, we're looking for people who are just amazing and would feel like, wow, you would be immediately going to make an impact in the things we're trying to build. Right? So that typically means you probably are already a pretty prolific contributor in open source. You've worked on, you know, things. In fact, as you can tell, all of our hiring so far are made through open source channels.

Alexander Lichter:

Yes.

Evan You:

So that's an important part of it. But then there are also people who may have worked in not open source projects, but have done really relevant work.

Alexander Lichter:

Let's say rspack, for example, which is open source

Evan You:

It's open source. But then there are, you know, people who've worked on compilers, language toolchains

Alexander Lichter:

Oh, just outside of JavaScript as well?

Evan You:

Yeah. Yeah. Again, there are no very you know, I can't really give you a really clear criteria of what you need to do in order for us to be interested. Yes. But, we do get, we've got more than, like, 20 emails, and there are a few interesting people.

Alexander Lichter:

Okay. That's nice to hear.

Evan You:

Yeah. But, again, like, the purpose of that is we want to start talking with these interesting people and keep the channel open, and at a later stage when the company grows further and we open up more headcount, you know, we'd be ready to get them on board.

Alexander Lichter:

But probably also same for, like, part of the Vitest team, more people from the Vite, team, and so on and so on. So there's also a plan probably to hire some more people from from them.

Evan You:

Yeah. Or we increase the sponsorship as the company scales.

Alexander Lichter:

Makes sense. Evan, thank you so much for the interview. I hope, for you out there all questions are answered. Otherwise, just let us know. And, yeah.

Alexander Lichter:

Thank you so much.

Evan You:

Thank you.