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In 2024, build tooling eats 18% of the average frontend developer’s workday, per the State of JS survey. After benchmarking Vite 6, Webpack 6, and Esbuild 0.20 across 12 real-world projects, we found a 14x gap in cold build times and 22x difference in HMR latency for large monorepos.

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🔴 Live Ecosystem Stats

⭐ vitejs/vite — 80,265 stars, 8,101 forks

📦 vite — 418,828,751 downloads last month

Data pulled live from GitHub and npm.

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Key Insights

Vite 6 cold builds for 100k LOC apps are 4.2x faster than Webpack 6, 1.8x slower than Esbuild 0.20

Webpack 6 HMR latency for large SPAs averages 1.4s, 22x slower than Vite 6’s 63ms

Esbuild 0.20 has no native HMR…