Vite 4 Released: Rollup 3 and a New SWC React Plugin

What happened

Vite 4 was released on December 9, 2022, according to the official Vite blog. In the five months since Vite 3, weekly npm downloads had grown from 1 million to 2.5 million, and the Vite-powered framework ecosystem, including Astro, Nuxt 3, SvelteKit and others, had continued to mature.

Rollup 3

Vite 4 upgraded its build-time engine to Rollup 3, which had been released on the same day as the previous year's ViteConf. Moving to Rollup 3 let the Vite team simplify the tool's internal asset handling and brought many improvements. As with each major, the team worked with ecosystem partners through the vite-ecosystem-ci system to ensure a smooth upgrade path.

A new SWC React plugin

Vite 4 introduced a second official React plugin. The existing plugin uses esbuild and Babel, while the new plugin-react-swc replaces Babel with SWC during development, offering significantly faster cold starts and hot module replacement for large projects that do not need non-standard React extensions. The release also moved the modern browser build target to safari14 for wider ES2020 compatibility, and reduced Vite's install size by 23 percent compared with Vite 3.

Why it mattered

Vite 4 kept the tool aligned with the fast-moving JavaScript ecosystem it underpins, delivering build improvements through Rollup 3 and giving React developers a faster development option with the SWC plugin. The smaller install size and framework-agnostic plugin structure reinforced Vite's role as a lightweight, shared foundation for modern web tooling.

Related on Skillo

See also: Vite 5 and its Rollup 4 upgrade.

Sources

• Vite 4.0 is out! (official Vite blog)

Published date reflects the original event date (2022-12-09). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.