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It gave me a pause to think about how it came that I can never really tell what am I looking at anymore. Forget the HN title, which is stupid — what does this l

by krick 4y ago

It gave me a pause to think about how it came that I can never really tell what am I looking at anymore. Forget the HN title, which is stupid — what does this landing page tell me? Well, that it's… next gen, and it apparently can catch up with me, which is not much, since I'm not really catching up with what's going on anyway. Also, that it's "tooling". Like IDE, or framework, or maybe a chainsaw. Can't tell. "Getting started" page tells me that "Vite" (pronounced as "veet") is "quick" in French, then it proceeds with quite wordy installation guide. It also quickly mentions that it's a "build tool". Finally. So, like gulp or grunt, I guess? But it doesn't even mention those, or any other build tools it supposedly replaces. And it seems unlikely, since everybody uses some script that comes with angular or vue or any other framework of your choice nowadays…

ianpurton 4y ago
I had exactly the same experience. I gave it maybe 20 seconds then I was gone.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I'm not a developer and particularly not a front-end one. I have this problem all the time. Even some of the more "obvious" ones, say, nuxtjs, I have a hard time to get what exactly it offers and why I should use it.
- konfusinomicon 4y ago
  at this point I've come to realize that all you need to know about front end frameworks anymore is that they are not jquery
  - smt88 4y ago
    You are utterly wrong. There's a huge difference between even Next.js and create-react-app, even though they're both based on React. The JS framework space is huge, messy, complex, and endlessly frustrating, but you can't wave that all away just because you can't keep up with it. I can't keep up either, but I do employ people who do, and they recently moved all our build tooling to Vite, which dramatically improved our DX.
    - konfusinomicon 4y ago
      I agree! my comment was in jest and was just poking fun at the madness that is the JS ecosystem and it's often overly complex, and ever growing list of solutions to problems that could be probably be solved with a few lines of jQuery. in the words of Jack Borrough, Senior JS Developer, "JQuery, what are you, five? We use JJQuery." https://jjquery.io/ https://jjquery.io/
    - sireat 4y ago
      The hilarious thing is that this is the first time I am seeing DX in this context. Is DX meant to be Developer Experience or something different?
      - smt88 4y ago
        Yes, developer experience.
- blowski 4y ago
  Devil's Advocate position here. I don't know much about carpentry, and if I look at a website selling saws, I will struggle to understand the difference between different models. Dumbing down to an extent that I understand (when I probably won't buy the product anyway) risks alienating the target market that will. Due to customer demands, end-user requirements, and device fragmentation, front-end development has genuinely become _that_ demanding. So as a non-specialist in the field, you can't look at relatively specialist tools like Vite and Nuxt and expect to understand them straight away. Sure, many of us long for the halcyon days of "front end" meaning at most pulling in jQuery and embedding something in the page. But then I sound like my Grandad longing for the days when there was no internet at all.
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    Developer here. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that even when we work with the thing, we can't understand the homepage of the thing. For example at my $DAYJOB I know what we do but if I didn't the website wouldn't help me to understand.
    - gmassman 4y ago
      I'm also a developer and this is a terrible overstatement. My company sells a product that isn't particularly hard to understand, and our www site makes it pretty clear what we're selling.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      You might work at a sales-oriented company then, rather than a consumer or prosumer (self-service) oriented company. Sales-oriented company websites are purposefully opaque so as to not make a potential customer be able to easily compare and contrast tools without going through an in-depth demo for each one, led by salespeople and perhaps engineers.
  - azemetre 4y ago
    This is a good point if we were selling physical goods and limited by the amount of information we can convey on a screen but we aren't. I'd honestly include things like the what and why as critical to documentation. Most libraries, tools, and tech in general are bad at documentation. It's an active choice to omit discussing these things when they should obviously be included but writing good copy is hard. IDK seems like a good thing to invest in especially if you want your tool to become a dominate player instead of an encroaching tangent. While there are separate pages for the why and comparisons for vite (but it's only comparing itself to other bleeding edge tools rather than popular ones like webpack, browserify, gulp, grunt) they should be snippets of these sections on the front page. Right now there are 6 title cards of with wasted space with very little information. Compare this with playwright's home page you and immediately know why you want to use the tool: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/ For a personal taste thing, I'm not really a fan of these open source tools creating homepages similar to as you would see for various startups/products. My mind immediately goes "oh paid tool, oh well." They do say it's free in a lovely medium size text that doesn't standout much and is beyond the fold.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  It seems dev has become a subculture forest. Everything is simple if you're in that group and follow the problems and ideas around.
- metadat 4y ago
  You aren't alone. The frontend tooling and framework market is so flooded and noisy, with extremely high churn. At this point it's so hard to keep up with and build things with the latest thing, it's become a hilariously bad joke. What other language ecosystem is this insane?
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
The feature list on the home page indicate it’s a dev server.
Rapzid 4y ago
I feel the title is accurate but I'm familiar with Vite so recognize it's perhaps not adequate.. Anyway, it's a replacement for Webpack based toolchains focused on fast startup and HMR. Why Vite goes into details: https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  At least it includes the "why?" button (link? why does it look like a button to me?) unlike so many other projects that only have "get started" (I don't want to start something I have no clue about).
dtagames 4y ago
The page might not be great, but the product is! TL;DR is that Vite is a development and build server that requires very little setup. It's "quick" to scaffold a site in Lit, Angular, or React. And easy to build the static version for hosting. That's it! I wrote a post[0] recently on using Vite with Lit. It shows a real use case and setup scenario. Here's the relevant summary: "Vite (pronounced “veet” and French for quick) is a development and build server you can run locally. It’s perfect for writing and debugging Typescript apps because it updates the browser every time you make changes. And it’s perfect for deploying your finished app because Vite can easily build a static copy for publication to an inexpensive hosting website. You can keep a local copy at one stage of development and the production build at another, which is often what you need. As a bonus, Vite comes with built-scaffolding for Lit apps built with Typescript, which is just what we have in mind." [0] https://medium.com/@mimixco/getting-started-with-web-components-lit-part-2-3cd878aeca73 https://medium.com/@mimixco/getting-started-with-web-compone...
davidjfelix 4y ago
Ah, the age old HN pass-time of feeling like everything needs to fit your niche, leaving a comment about how a website didn't fill in your blind spot for you rather than googling what something is with the time.
- kodah 4y ago
  I don't think that's what OP is saying. To me, it reads like, "I'd love to know what this is, but based on the linked document and others within near proximity - I can't" which means the link requires that OP has knowledge of the frontend build world - which I will tell you is niche and disparate or that there is a big unsaid problem in this space that is non-obvious to anyone outside of it. Curiously, both are true. Give OP some slack.
  - sachinraja 4y ago
    If they don't have knowledge of the frontend build world, then maybe they'll have to do a bit more reading. Who should Vite's landing page target?
    - kodah 4y ago
      By knowledge, what I really mean is intimate knowledge. I'm not a frontend dev, but I do hack away on hobby projects which eventually caused me to make changes to the default tooling that the project starters pre-configure. Given that the landscape so heavily relies on preconfiguration and post-customization, who they're selling to are people who started with a template and know little about what webpack, vite, or next are doing.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  And that's a pastime i welcome, as it saved me many clicks. And, it also confirms what i have been seeing across several websites of late: difficult to penetrate, even in areas i would consider myself well-versed in.
- hsn915 4y ago
  If the official homepage of something doesn't tell you what it is, where are you supposed to obtain that inforation?
djitz 4y ago
- _ktx2 4y ago
  Whether the project is FOSS or not is irrelevant. They're seeking distribution and in order to further distribute a project needs to be able to cleanly communicate why it deserves more distribution. Ironically, based on your comment, FOSS products are generally very good at this. What OP provided was criticism, and FOSS needs and welcomes criticism to stay strong and relevant. If OP was opening a GitHub issue and berating the maintainers I would agree with you. tldr: "They don't get paid" is not an escape hatch for genuine, level-headed criticism, and criticism is important for FOSS to stay strong and relevant.
  - djitz 4y ago
    The argument presented was neither level-headed nor genuine.
    - kodah 4y ago
      It's a tad emotional but still cogent.
- prophesi 4y ago
  I find it extra funny that most of the comments recommend that they just say it's a webpack replacement. If you don't know what webpack is and visit webpack's site, you'll just see it's an asset bundler which Vite explicitly is not. And if you do already know what webpack is, then "frontend tooling" and its list of features should make it very obvious what Vite is.
brundolf 4y ago
If you're immersed in the front-end world today you would probably know that "build tooling" (and could guess that just "tooling") typically means a) transpilation, and b) bundling; "take my source and turn it into something I can ship and run". Usually there are also related features like minification and/or a live-reloading dev server. For a long time Babel and Webpack played these roles, respectively, but in the last couple years people have realized things can be way faster and simpler if you integrate the two steps into a single tool and make it opinionated and write it in a native language. As a result we've seen the explosion of options like esbuild, SWC, Parcel, etc. I assume Vite is somewhere in that space But I agree it's better to be explicit and not assume the reader has all the contextual background Edit: If you click "Why Vite?" they actually have a wonderful explainer that goes into the above and how Vite relates to it
mrwnmonm 4y ago
Lol, I was about to comment here that I opened the docs, read a few pages, and still don't know how this works or how is it different from react for example.
- asheeshh 4y ago
monkey_monkey 4y ago
"Next gen front end tooling" - for anyone with some vague knowledge of front end development would understand that this is going to be something like webpack, or mix, or grunt, or gulp. Not every front page has to assume the person going to it knows nothing.
- finfinfin 4y ago
  Front-end tooling that I have to run on the server? Even people familiar with the JS ecosystem might be confused by that.
  - matt89 4y ago
    I believe you are overexaggerating. It has always been true that you needed some kind of local server when doing frontend development. There are multiple browser mechanism that would not work in any way other than when rendering html/css/js that was returned from a server. Consequently a build tool (or dev-tool) that offers you a dev-server is really nothing weird in frontend development world. Same as 10-15 years ago when using jQuery and PHP and you would use XAMPP or LAMPP.
    - finfinfin 4y ago
      Just google “front-end tools” and look at the few top results. There are many tools for front-end development that are not build tools or have to run on the server.
  - monkey_monkey 4y ago
    You don't have to run this on a server. This would never run on a server. This would be used in your local dev environment.
    - wonnage 4y ago
      your local dev environment is running a server
oxplot 4y ago
> It gave me a pause to think about how it came that I can never really tell what am I looking at anymore. They need to read up on https://posthog.com/blog/hacker-news-premortem https://posthog.com/blog/hacker-news-premortem
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Terrible landing page for an otherwise excellent tool. It sets up JS transpiling and bundling for you in an easy way, then provide a server with pretty fast hot reload. This solves 2 problems: - the complicated js project stack is now simple to setup, unlike with webpack - saving and seeing the result of your coding is now almost instant, unlike with CRA It's a joy to use, given that it's from VueJS author, and I highly recommend it to anyone that has a lof of frontend to do.
- superzamp 4y ago
  Would this replace parcel or be adjacent to it?
  - toastercat 4y ago
    Replace it.
  - tafath 4y ago
    https://npmtrends.com/parcel-vs-vite https://npmtrends.com/parcel-vs-vite
- SCLeo 4y ago
  I have been using parcel for web development because I thought webpack is very difficult to use. However, for my latest personal project, I tried webpack. To my surprise, I found webpack 5 much simpler to use then I thought it is (significantly easier than make or gradle, the complexity is not even on the same level). Everything pretty much worked out of box now. All I had to do was to copy the starting template for typescript from their website (~20 lines, half of which are open/closing brackets) and copy the setup for dev server. HMR, code splitting via dynamic imports, etc. all worked without any setup.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    Vite is just a few lines, and it’s a much better experience than webpack
  - 4y ago
lucideer 4y ago
> it apparently can catch up with me, which is not much, since I'm not really catching up with what's going on anyway This entirely depends on your situation but for a tool like this (the selling point being that it does it all for you) I think this is less about catching up with you and more about providing you with the tooling that catches up to the myriad of things in JS that you may feel the need to catch up with. In this case it's most likely referring to the decision to use native es modules to serve non-dependency code. This means and code you write can use native browser cutting edge without you needing to worry about "what build tooling supports the latest documented standard native browser features" - one of the pains of building is using X standard native tech documented clearly on MDN and finding out it doesn't work cleanly with a specific combination of webpack/rollup plugins I'm leveraging right now. This just lets you use what's standard.
gexla 4y ago
Personally, I feel like it's rare that I stumble on a tool and need to read its landing page. If I know of it, it's probably because someone told me about it or it's already part of something I inherited. And that's probably the only way I would consider it anyway. I don't care what their pitch is if I don't know anyone using it. Much more common is stumbling across a repo with tooling I'm specifically looking for (because I don't know anyone doing that specific thing and I'm not looking for an alternative to something I'm already using) and the repo docs are even worse.
detritus 4y ago
Thank you for saying this, because often when this sort of thing pops up on HN I click on the link and stare blankly at the page wondering "Just what the hell IS this?!" and I feel particularly stupid. I only keep one foot in the webdev sphere as it's not my primary focus any more, but still - I feel that I should be able to 'get it'. - ed : I should've read the comments first. Glad I'm not alone! My studio is in a building that also does musical events and there are always posters up for various gigs and I so often have a similar complaint - they're 'designed' (as in, imho, poorly) by someone who's had their head buried in the thing they're promoting and forget that people slightly outside their context need a bit more of a nudge. There's one new one out there today that doesn't have any links to help define context, and the name of the artist is so generic as to be tricky to filter on a web search.
cercatrova 4y ago
Looks like you're looking for the Why Vite page [0]. """ # The Problems Before ES modules were available in browsers, developers had no native mechanism for authoring JavaScript in a modularized fashion. This is why we are all familiar with the concept of "bundling": using tools that crawl, process and concatenate our source modules into files that can run in the browser. Over time we have seen tools like webpack, Rollup and Parcel, which greatly improved the development experience for frontend developers. However, as we start to build more and more ambitious applications, the amount of JavaScript we are dealing with also increased exponentially. It is not uncommon for large scale projects to contain thousands of modules. We are starting to hit a performance bottleneck for JavaScript based tooling: it can often take an unreasonably long wait (sometimes up to minutes!) to spin up a dev server, and even with HMR, file edits can take a couple seconds to be reflected in the browser. The slow feedback loop can greatly affect developers' productivity and happiness. Vite aims to address these issues by leveraging new advancements in the ecosystem: the availability of native ES modules in the browser, and the rise of JavaScript tools written in compile-to-native languages. """ [0] https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html
wslh 4y ago
I remember that Visual Basic (90s) opened with an empty Dialog and UI controls like Windows Forms, Delphi and Xcode now. Just waiting for a tool as easy to use as Google Slides or diagrams.net (draw.io) but produceing the skeleton of an web/mobile app. Does the software industry have a pathology that avoids making such tool and makes front-end engineers irrelevant except for very complex use cases?
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > Does the software industry have a pathology that avoids making such tool and makes front-end engineers irrelevant except for very complex use cases? Probably the fact that it's all very opinionated. Suppose you want to use Vue. Well, do you want Vue 2 or Vue 3? JavaScript or TypeScript? Which of the component libraries do you want: PrimeVue, Quasar, or another one? State management with Pinia or Vuex? What about validations: Vuelidate or maybe something like Vue Formulate, which also includes functionality for forms. Or would you like Vueform instead? Then again, the same happens if you want to use React or Angular, or any other option out there. There's just too many separate pieces to pick, though I presume that occasionally there are opinionated attempts at giving you a stable base to start out with. Honestly, even something like Ruby on Rails can be a nice option, though it's also understandable that many out there want to create their front ends as separate apps. Yet the majority of front end projects out there end up a bit like the Dropwizard framework for Java back end development - just stitched together from any number of different pieces, which sometimes will work really well together, but other times less so: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/latest/ https://www.dropwizard.io/en/latest/
keithnz 4y ago
click "Why Vite?". I think it has a pretty good explanation about what it is doing and the tools that are similar to it and the problem it is trying to solve.
Myto 4y ago
Funny. The landing page told me immediately what it is. And I'm not some expert, I've only done a little bit of hobbyist JS development.
Etheryte 4y ago
The first sentence of the "Getting started" page tells you the following: > Vite (French word for "quick", pronounced /vit/, like "veet") is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. But of course it's easier to keep ranting and ignore the second part of the sentence you referenced because it doesn't match your narrative.
- hsn915 4y ago
  That's still very generic so as to be almost no information. Imagine if python's homepage had no code samples at all, and the getting started page said "Python is a programming language for high productivity".
  - Etheryte 4y ago
    While I somewhat see where you're coming from, I don't really agree, but again, I would be biased since I already know plenty about different build tools. The main statement is that it's a build tool for modern web projects, which makes me thing a-la Webpack and similar. Then it's further specified that it's fast (which Webpack usually is not) and lean (which Webpack definitely is not). For me this already gives a rough idea of what to expect, whereas the Python analogy wouldn't tell me that much.
denkmoon 4y ago
Over the last few years I've noticed a new heuristic I use for determining if something is good/worth investigating or not; Can I tell what it is within 60 seconds of looking at its website.
traspler 4y ago
This might be stupid and petty but the only reason why I want enough Karma on HN is to be able to downvote these kinds of comments. They make me irrationally angry. Especially if they are under a link to a release announcement or changelog link, which at least, this is not.
andruby 4y ago
The Why page imo does a better job of explaining the reason it exists: https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
It does not really matter, but vite in French means quickly. Quick is rapide.
aliswe 4y ago
We switched to vite not for what it is but because what it isn't. We get react and scss compilation/bundling with 4 lines of config (it basically just says "react()"). production builds take under a minute. npm install takes 6 seconds tops. it starts dev mode in a second with hot reloading enabled. you can tell me how awesome its tech is under the hood for hours, but i dont care. it STAYS OUT OF THE WAY and thats wha i want. just as it should.
simjnd 4y ago
Terrible landing page indeed, when their "Why" page [1] has most of the answers new users would be looking for. [1]: https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html

by krick 4y ago

ianpurton 4y ago

I had exactly the same experience. I gave it maybe 20 seconds then I was gone.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I'm not a developer and particularly not a front-end one. I have this problem all the time. Even some of the more "obvious" ones, say, nuxtjs, I have a hard time to get what exactly it offers and why I should use it.

konfusinomicon 4y ago
at this point I've come to realize that all you need to know about front end frameworks anymore is that they are not jquery
- smt88 4y ago
  You are utterly wrong. There's a huge difference between even Next.js and create-react-app, even though they're both based on React. The JS framework space is huge, messy, complex, and endlessly frustrating, but you can't wave that all away just because you can't keep up with it. I can't keep up either, but I do employ people who do, and they recently moved all our build tooling to Vite, which dramatically improved our DX.
  - konfusinomicon 4y ago
    I agree! my comment was in jest and was just poking fun at the madness that is the JS ecosystem and it's often overly complex, and ever growing list of solutions to problems that could be probably be solved with a few lines of jQuery. in the words of Jack Borrough, Senior JS Developer, "JQuery, what are you, five? We use JJQuery." https://jjquery.io/ https://jjquery.io/
  - sireat 4y ago
    The hilarious thing is that this is the first time I am seeing DX in this context. Is DX meant to be Developer Experience or something different?
    - smt88 4y ago
      Yes, developer experience.
blowski 4y ago
Devil's Advocate position here. I don't know much about carpentry, and if I look at a website selling saws, I will struggle to understand the difference between different models. Dumbing down to an extent that I understand (when I probably won't buy the product anyway) risks alienating the target market that will. Due to customer demands, end-user requirements, and device fragmentation, front-end development has genuinely become _that_ demanding. So as a non-specialist in the field, you can't look at relatively specialist tools like Vite and Nuxt and expect to understand them straight away. Sure, many of us long for the halcyon days of "front end" meaning at most pulling in jQuery and embedding something in the page. But then I sound like my Grandad longing for the days when there was no internet at all.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  Developer here. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that even when we work with the thing, we can't understand the homepage of the thing. For example at my $DAYJOB I know what we do but if I didn't the website wouldn't help me to understand.
  - gmassman 4y ago
    I'm also a developer and this is a terrible overstatement. My company sells a product that isn't particularly hard to understand, and our www site makes it pretty clear what we're selling.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    You might work at a sales-oriented company then, rather than a consumer or prosumer (self-service) oriented company. Sales-oriented company websites are purposefully opaque so as to not make a potential customer be able to easily compare and contrast tools without going through an in-depth demo for each one, led by salespeople and perhaps engineers.
- azemetre 4y ago
  This is a good point if we were selling physical goods and limited by the amount of information we can convey on a screen but we aren't. I'd honestly include things like the what and why as critical to documentation. Most libraries, tools, and tech in general are bad at documentation. It's an active choice to omit discussing these things when they should obviously be included but writing good copy is hard. IDK seems like a good thing to invest in especially if you want your tool to become a dominate player instead of an encroaching tangent. While there are separate pages for the why and comparisons for vite (but it's only comparing itself to other bleeding edge tools rather than popular ones like webpack, browserify, gulp, grunt) they should be snippets of these sections on the front page. Right now there are 6 title cards of with wasted space with very little information. Compare this with playwright's home page you and immediately know why you want to use the tool: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/ For a personal taste thing, I'm not really a fan of these open source tools creating homepages similar to as you would see for various startups/products. My mind immediately goes "oh paid tool, oh well." They do say it's free in a lovely medium size text that doesn't standout much and is beyond the fold.
agumonkey 4y ago
It seems dev has become a subculture forest. Everything is simple if you're in that group and follow the problems and ideas around.
metadat 4y ago
You aren't alone. The frontend tooling and framework market is so flooded and noisy, with extremely high churn. At this point it's so hard to keep up with and build things with the latest thing, it's become a hilariously bad joke. What other language ecosystem is this insane?

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

The feature list on the home page indicate it’s a dev server.

Rapzid 4y ago

I feel the title is accurate but I'm familiar with Vite so recognize it's perhaps not adequate.. Anyway, it's a replacement for Webpack based toolchains focused on fast startup and HMR. Why Vite goes into details: https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jimmygrapes 4y ago
At least it includes the "why?" button (link? why does it look like a button to me?) unlike so many other projects that only have "get started" (I don't want to start something I have no clue about).

dtagames 4y ago

The page might not be great, but the product is! TL;DR is that Vite is a development and build server that requires very little setup. It's "quick" to scaffold a site in Lit, Angular, or React. And easy to build the static version for hosting. That's it! I wrote a post[0] recently on using Vite with Lit. It shows a real use case and setup scenario. Here's the relevant summary: "Vite (pronounced “veet” and French for quick) is a development and build server you can run locally. It’s perfect for writing and debugging Typescript apps because it updates the browser every time you make changes. And it’s perfect for deploying your finished app because Vite can easily build a static copy for publication to an inexpensive hosting website. You can keep a local copy at one stage of development and the production build at another, which is often what you need. As a bonus, Vite comes with built-scaffolding for Lit apps built with Typescript, which is just what we have in mind." [0] https://medium.com/@mimixco/getting-started-with-web-components-lit-part-2-3cd878aeca73 https://medium.com/@mimixco/getting-started-with-web-compone...

davidjfelix 4y ago

Ah, the age old HN pass-time of feeling like everything needs to fit your niche, leaving a comment about how a website didn't fill in your blind spot for you rather than googling what something is with the time.

kodah 4y ago
I don't think that's what OP is saying. To me, it reads like, "I'd love to know what this is, but based on the linked document and others within near proximity - I can't" which means the link requires that OP has knowledge of the frontend build world - which I will tell you is niche and disparate or that there is a big unsaid problem in this space that is non-obvious to anyone outside of it. Curiously, both are true. Give OP some slack.
- sachinraja 4y ago
  If they don't have knowledge of the frontend build world, then maybe they'll have to do a bit more reading. Who should Vite's landing page target?
  - kodah 4y ago
    By knowledge, what I really mean is intimate knowledge. I'm not a frontend dev, but I do hack away on hobby projects which eventually caused me to make changes to the default tooling that the project starters pre-configure. Given that the landscape so heavily relies on preconfiguration and post-customization, who they're selling to are people who started with a template and know little about what webpack, vite, or next are doing.
InCityDreams 4y ago
And that's a pastime i welcome, as it saved me many clicks. And, it also confirms what i have been seeing across several websites of late: difficult to penetrate, even in areas i would consider myself well-versed in.
hsn915 4y ago
If the official homepage of something doesn't tell you what it is, where are you supposed to obtain that inforation?

djitz 4y ago

_ktx2 4y ago
Whether the project is FOSS or not is irrelevant. They're seeking distribution and in order to further distribute a project needs to be able to cleanly communicate why it deserves more distribution. Ironically, based on your comment, FOSS products are generally very good at this. What OP provided was criticism, and FOSS needs and welcomes criticism to stay strong and relevant. If OP was opening a GitHub issue and berating the maintainers I would agree with you. tldr: "They don't get paid" is not an escape hatch for genuine, level-headed criticism, and criticism is important for FOSS to stay strong and relevant.
- djitz 4y ago
  The argument presented was neither level-headed nor genuine.
  - kodah 4y ago
    It's a tad emotional but still cogent.
prophesi 4y ago
I find it extra funny that most of the comments recommend that they just say it's a webpack replacement. If you don't know what webpack is and visit webpack's site, you'll just see it's an asset bundler which Vite explicitly is not. And if you do already know what webpack is, then "frontend tooling" and its list of features should make it very obvious what Vite is.

brundolf 4y ago

If you're immersed in the front-end world today you would probably know that "build tooling" (and could guess that just "tooling") typically means a) transpilation, and b) bundling; "take my source and turn it into something I can ship and run". Usually there are also related features like minification and/or a live-reloading dev server. For a long time Babel and Webpack played these roles, respectively, but in the last couple years people have realized things can be way faster and simpler if you integrate the two steps into a single tool and make it opinionated and write it in a native language. As a result we've seen the explosion of options like esbuild, SWC, Parcel, etc. I assume Vite is somewhere in that space But I agree it's better to be explicit and not assume the reader has all the contextual background Edit: If you click "Why Vite?" they actually have a wonderful explainer that goes into the above and how Vite relates to it

mrwnmonm 4y ago

Lol, I was about to comment here that I opened the docs, read a few pages, and still don't know how this works or how is it different from react for example.

asheeshh 4y ago

monkey_monkey 4y ago

"Next gen front end tooling" - for anyone with some vague knowledge of front end development would understand that this is going to be something like webpack, or mix, or grunt, or gulp. Not every front page has to assume the person going to it knows nothing.

finfinfin 4y ago
Front-end tooling that I have to run on the server? Even people familiar with the JS ecosystem might be confused by that.
- matt89 4y ago
  I believe you are overexaggerating. It has always been true that you needed some kind of local server when doing frontend development. There are multiple browser mechanism that would not work in any way other than when rendering html/css/js that was returned from a server. Consequently a build tool (or dev-tool) that offers you a dev-server is really nothing weird in frontend development world. Same as 10-15 years ago when using jQuery and PHP and you would use XAMPP or LAMPP.
  - finfinfin 4y ago
    Just google “front-end tools” and look at the few top results. There are many tools for front-end development that are not build tools or have to run on the server.
- monkey_monkey 4y ago
  You don't have to run this on a server. This would never run on a server. This would be used in your local dev environment.
  - wonnage 4y ago
    your local dev environment is running a server

oxplot 4y ago

> It gave me a pause to think about how it came that I can never really tell what am I looking at anymore. They need to read up on https://posthog.com/blog/hacker-news-premortem https://posthog.com/blog/hacker-news-premortem

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Terrible landing page for an otherwise excellent tool. It sets up JS transpiling and bundling for you in an easy way, then provide a server with pretty fast hot reload. This solves 2 problems: - the complicated js project stack is now simple to setup, unlike with webpack - saving and seeing the result of your coding is now almost instant, unlike with CRA It's a joy to use, given that it's from VueJS author, and I highly recommend it to anyone that has a lof of frontend to do.

superzamp 4y ago
Would this replace parcel or be adjacent to it?
- toastercat 4y ago
  Replace it.
- tafath 4y ago
  https://npmtrends.com/parcel-vs-vite https://npmtrends.com/parcel-vs-vite
SCLeo 4y ago
I have been using parcel for web development because I thought webpack is very difficult to use. However, for my latest personal project, I tried webpack. To my surprise, I found webpack 5 much simpler to use then I thought it is (significantly easier than make or gradle, the complexity is not even on the same level). Everything pretty much worked out of box now. All I had to do was to copy the starting template for typescript from their website (~20 lines, half of which are open/closing brackets) and copy the setup for dev server. HMR, code splitting via dynamic imports, etc. all worked without any setup.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  Vite is just a few lines, and it’s a much better experience than webpack
- 4y ago

lucideer 4y ago

> it apparently can catch up with me, which is not much, since I'm not really catching up with what's going on anyway This entirely depends on your situation but for a tool like this (the selling point being that it does it all for you) I think this is less about catching up with you and more about providing you with the tooling that catches up to the myriad of things in JS that you may feel the need to catch up with. In this case it's most likely referring to the decision to use native es modules to serve non-dependency code. This means and code you write can use native browser cutting edge without you needing to worry about "what build tooling supports the latest documented standard native browser features" - one of the pains of building is using X standard native tech documented clearly on MDN and finding out it doesn't work cleanly with a specific combination of webpack/rollup plugins I'm leveraging right now. This just lets you use what's standard.

gexla 4y ago

Personally, I feel like it's rare that I stumble on a tool and need to read its landing page. If I know of it, it's probably because someone told me about it or it's already part of something I inherited. And that's probably the only way I would consider it anyway. I don't care what their pitch is if I don't know anyone using it. Much more common is stumbling across a repo with tooling I'm specifically looking for (because I don't know anyone doing that specific thing and I'm not looking for an alternative to something I'm already using) and the repo docs are even worse.

detritus 4y ago

Thank you for saying this, because often when this sort of thing pops up on HN I click on the link and stare blankly at the page wondering "Just what the hell IS this?!" and I feel particularly stupid. I only keep one foot in the webdev sphere as it's not my primary focus any more, but still - I feel that I should be able to 'get it'. - ed : I should've read the comments first. Glad I'm not alone! My studio is in a building that also does musical events and there are always posters up for various gigs and I so often have a similar complaint - they're 'designed' (as in, imho, poorly) by someone who's had their head buried in the thing they're promoting and forget that people slightly outside their context need a bit more of a nudge. There's one new one out there today that doesn't have any links to help define context, and the name of the artist is so generic as to be tricky to filter on a web search.

cercatrova 4y ago

Looks like you're looking for the Why Vite page [0]. """ # The Problems Before ES modules were available in browsers, developers had no native mechanism for authoring JavaScript in a modularized fashion. This is why we are all familiar with the concept of "bundling": using tools that crawl, process and concatenate our source modules into files that can run in the browser. Over time we have seen tools like webpack, Rollup and Parcel, which greatly improved the development experience for frontend developers. However, as we start to build more and more ambitious applications, the amount of JavaScript we are dealing with also increased exponentially. It is not uncommon for large scale projects to contain thousands of modules. We are starting to hit a performance bottleneck for JavaScript based tooling: it can often take an unreasonably long wait (sometimes up to minutes!) to spin up a dev server, and even with HMR, file edits can take a couple seconds to be reflected in the browser. The slow feedback loop can greatly affect developers' productivity and happiness. Vite aims to address these issues by leveraging new advancements in the ecosystem: the availability of native ES modules in the browser, and the rise of JavaScript tools written in compile-to-native languages. """ [0] https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html

wslh 4y ago

I remember that Visual Basic (90s) opened with an empty Dialog and UI controls like Windows Forms, Delphi and Xcode now. Just waiting for a tool as easy to use as Google Slides or diagrams.net (draw.io) but produceing the skeleton of an web/mobile app. Does the software industry have a pathology that avoids making such tool and makes front-end engineers irrelevant except for very complex use cases?

KronisLV 4y ago
> Does the software industry have a pathology that avoids making such tool and makes front-end engineers irrelevant except for very complex use cases? Probably the fact that it's all very opinionated. Suppose you want to use Vue. Well, do you want Vue 2 or Vue 3? JavaScript or TypeScript? Which of the component libraries do you want: PrimeVue, Quasar, or another one? State management with Pinia or Vuex? What about validations: Vuelidate or maybe something like Vue Formulate, which also includes functionality for forms. Or would you like Vueform instead? Then again, the same happens if you want to use React or Angular, or any other option out there. There's just too many separate pieces to pick, though I presume that occasionally there are opinionated attempts at giving you a stable base to start out with. Honestly, even something like Ruby on Rails can be a nice option, though it's also understandable that many out there want to create their front ends as separate apps. Yet the majority of front end projects out there end up a bit like the Dropwizard framework for Java back end development - just stitched together from any number of different pieces, which sometimes will work really well together, but other times less so: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/latest/ https://www.dropwizard.io/en/latest/

keithnz 4y ago

click "Why Vite?". I think it has a pretty good explanation about what it is doing and the tools that are similar to it and the problem it is trying to solve.

Myto 4y ago

Funny. The landing page told me immediately what it is. And I'm not some expert, I've only done a little bit of hobbyist JS development.

Etheryte 4y ago

The first sentence of the "Getting started" page tells you the following: > Vite (French word for "quick", pronounced /vit/, like "veet") is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. But of course it's easier to keep ranting and ignore the second part of the sentence you referenced because it doesn't match your narrative.

hsn915 4y ago
That's still very generic so as to be almost no information. Imagine if python's homepage had no code samples at all, and the getting started page said "Python is a programming language for high productivity".
- Etheryte 4y ago
  While I somewhat see where you're coming from, I don't really agree, but again, I would be biased since I already know plenty about different build tools. The main statement is that it's a build tool for modern web projects, which makes me thing a-la Webpack and similar. Then it's further specified that it's fast (which Webpack usually is not) and lean (which Webpack definitely is not). For me this already gives a rough idea of what to expect, whereas the Python analogy wouldn't tell me that much.

denkmoon 4y ago

Over the last few years I've noticed a new heuristic I use for determining if something is good/worth investigating or not; Can I tell what it is within 60 seconds of looking at its website.

traspler 4y ago

This might be stupid and petty but the only reason why I want enough Karma on HN is to be able to downvote these kinds of comments. They make me irrationally angry. Especially if they are under a link to a release announcement or changelog link, which at least, this is not.

andruby 4y ago

The Why page imo does a better job of explaining the reason it exists: https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://vitejs.dev/guide/why.html

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

It does not really matter, but vite in French means quickly. Quick is rapide.

aliswe 4y ago

We switched to vite not for what it is but because what it isn't. We get react and scss compilation/bundling with 4 lines of config (it basically just says "react()"). production builds take under a minute. npm install takes 6 seconds tops. it starts dev mode in a second with hot reloading enabled. you can tell me how awesome its tech is under the hood for hours, but i dont care. it STAYS OUT OF THE WAY and thats wha i want. just as it should.

simjnd 4y ago

Terrible landing page indeed, when their "Why" page [1] has most of the answers new users would be looking for. [1]: https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html