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

• Announcement Blogpost
• ViteConf Keynote
• VoidZero Team
• Vite License Change PR
• Rolldown Vite Fork