Deno Bundle: Use Rolldown instead of ESBuild

[VienDinhCom]

Hey Deno Team!

As fans of Deno’s mission to simplify and secure JavaScript development, we think it’s time to consider Rolldown as your go-to bundler over ESBuild. Here’s why Rolldown could supercharge Deno’s ecosystem:

Blazing Fast Performance: Rolldown, built in Rust, matches ESBuild’s speed but often surpasses it, especially in WebAssembly builds. It’s 10-30x faster than Rollup, making it a powerhouse for large-scale projects. Faster builds mean happier devs!

Rollup-Compatible API: Rolldown’s API aligns with Rollup, ensuring seamless integration with Vite’s ecosystem and plugins. This compatibility reduces friction for Deno users building web apps.

Enhanced Features for Web Apps: Rolldown supports advanced features like code-splitting and CSS handling out of the box, addressing ESBuild’s limitations (e.g., weak code-splitting support). This makes it ideal for Deno’s web-focused projects, reducing configuration headaches.

Future-Proof Ecosystem: Designed for Vite but versatile as a standalone bundler, Rolldown is actively developed with a focus on modern JS/TS needs. It avoids ESBuild’s maintenance challenges, like sporadic plugin updates, ensuring long-term reliability for Deno’s community.

Community Momentum: The JavaScript world is buzzing about Rolldown. Adopting it could position Deno as a leader in cutting-edge tooling, attracting more devs to your ecosystem.

Deno’s philosophy of simplicity and performance aligns perfectly with Rolldown’s strengths. Let’s move away from ESBuild’s Node-centric constraints and embrace a bundler that’s fast, flexible, and future-ready.

[marvinhagemeister]

Yeah, we've been keeping an eye on rolldown for quite a while and are in contact with the team behind it. The reason we went with esbuild for now instead is simple: It's been more battle tested. At the time of this writing rolldown is not widely used in production. We built deno bundle in a way that lets us easily swap out the bundler behind it. So once rolldown matures more, it's likely that we'll switch to that.