Vite 8 + Rolldown Complete Guide — Ending the esbuild·Rollup Dual-Bundler Era with a Single Rust Bundler and the Oxc Toolchain

On March 12, 2026, Evan You's VoidZero released Vite 8.0 as GA. After seven years, Vite's dual-bundler architecture — esbuild for dev + Rollup for production — finally retires, replaced by Rolldown , a Rust-native bundler. This is not a cosmetic dependency swap. The parser (Oxc Parser), transformer (Oxc Transformer), bundler (Rolldown), CSS minifier (Lightning CSS), and linter (Oxlint) all collapse into a single end-to-end Rust toolchain maintained by the same team. Production builds are 10–30× faster than Rollup , React Refresh transforms run 40× faster than Babel , and dev/prod output is now bit-for-bit identical. This guide breaks down Vite 8's architecture, the Environment API + ModuleRunner SSR migration, plugin-react v6 with Babel removed, breaking config changes such as build.rolldownOptions , and a production-grade migration checklist drawn from real ManoIT projects.

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