Rustifying Vite: Designing a Hybrid Toolchain for the Real World

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JavaScript tooling is fast until it isn't. As projects scale, even well-designed JS-based tools start to hit ceilings around cold starts, dealing with large dependency graphs, and CPU-heavy transforms. The obvious answer seems to be "rewrite it in Rust" except that reality is messier.

This talk is a deep dive into what actually happens when you introduce Rust into a JavaScript-first toolchain, with Vite as the core example. We'll explore how Vite’s architecture enables selective rustification, and what we learned from building hybrid pipelines that mix JavaScript and Rust without wrecking DX.

This talk has been presented at JSNation 2026, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

Alexander Lichter
Alexander Lichter
Video transcription, chapters and summary will be available later.

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