plugin-react: is it using esbuild or babel?

[guoyunhe]

When making a production build of a react project with Vite, the speed isn't as fast as I expected with esbuild. Is it using babel or esbuild?

[patak-dev]

plugin-react uses babel (you can see the code here), there are several pieces of the React ecosystem that still requires it (babel isn't used in Vue or Svelte). esbuild is still used by Vite when you are using this plugin though.

babel may be replaced by SWC to speed things up at one point, you can see early explorations from the community here https://github.com/iheyunfei/vite-on-swc

A production build in general is using rollup, so you can't expect it to be as fast as bundling with esbuild. During build time, Vite doesn't optimize for bundling speed but prefers the flexibility and maturity of the rollup ecosystem.