# Rolldown

13 Hacker News commenters recommended Rolldown and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A Rust-based JavaScript bundler that is a drop-in replacement for Rollup's API and plugins, and makes builds much faster, especially as the bundler behind Vite 8.

## Why people recommend it

- Much faster builds than before (4 comments): "We've been running rolldown-vite on a mid-sized project for a few weeks now and the production builds went from ~35s to under 8s." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362139)) "It's a drop-in replacement for the most part, and slashed our built times down to 12%." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565772)) "it is much faster since it isn't written in JavaScript" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762207))
- Drop-in replacement, works with Rollup (3 comments): "It's a drop-in replacement for the most part, and slashed our built times down to 12%." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565772)) "Rolldown is compatible to Rollup's API and can use most Rollup plugins" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067303)) "the rolldown bundler in Vite 8 makes switching to plain Vite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365146))
- Written in Rust, so fast (2 comments): "it is much faster since it isn't written in JavaScript" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762207)) "rolldown -> tsdown (ts support, but in rast and fast)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766159))
- Powers Vite 8 and related tools (3 comments): "Extremely happy user of Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, tsdown, Oxlint, and Oxfmt." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762400)) "the rolldown bundler in Vite 8 makes switching to plain Vite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365146)) "The main reason for this is rolldown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361806))

## What people warn about

- Some code may break in edge cases (1 comments): "I'm certain this line[1] of code won't work in some cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164039))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Vite](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vite.md): 135 recommend
- [esbuild](https://hackerapproved.com/p/esbuild.md): 31 recommend
- [webpack](https://hackerapproved.com/p/webpack.md): 13 recommend
- [Turbopack](https://hackerapproved.com/p/turbopack.md): 12 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Rolldown", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rolldown/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).