Rich Harris | Remote Control | ViteConf 2025

Hello everyone. Uh my name is Rich Harris and this talk is called remote control for reasons that will soon become apparent. I'm here representing the spelt team. For those of you who aren't familiar, spelt is a declarative component framework similar in spirit to react and view and solid and things of that nature, albeit with a few philosophical differences. In addition to spelt itself, we maintain a full stack application framework

called speltkit, which is our vision for what building robust, accessible web apps should feel like. It is an incomplete vision. There is a lot of work still to do and some of that work is what I'm here to talk about today. If you haven't tried spelt before, you should. It's a project that many of your fellow developers are very excited about. In the state of JavaScript survey, we were the most interesting framework for the last six years running. But very few projects have garnered more developer love than Vit. And part of the reason that I'm so excited to be

speaking at VCOM is that Spelkit and Vit have a long shared history. We were the first meta framework to adopt Vit when it hit version two. And we wrote the serverside module loader which is necessary for serverside rendering that was adopted in V is the SSR load module API. We have overlapping teams. There are many people who contribute to both VET and spelt. We're invested in each other's success. But in a way, my personal history with Vit goes back much further, back in fact to before Vit existed. 10 years ago, I started a

project called Rollup, which some of you have probably heard of. It is the module bundler that Vit uses internally to produce your production builds. Back then, it had a singular focus, which was building libraries. You would author your code in native JavaScript modules and roll up would bundle them into a script that could run in node or in the browser because back then, you couldn't run modules natively. It didn't know about Common.js or TypeScript or anything like that. It just knew about JavaScript. You could at least specify a transform array. Most notably, back then, we would use

Babel to transform our cutting edge ES6 code with arrow functions and class declarations to the ES5 code that actually ran in browsers. Some of you might have missed that era, and I deeply envy you. So in addition to rollup I maintained a project called rollup babel which basically just augmented rollup with the configuration needed to convert ES6 to ES5 and after a while I thought everyone wants this this functionality shouldn't it be the default and so 10 years ago almost to the day I

proposed just that and Oscar Sees aka Victory Stick one of the key early contributors said counterpoint no he proposed the creation of a plug-in API instead dead. And so that is how a decade ago the rollup plug-in API came to be. I often get credit for it and I shouldn't because it was not my idea. In my defense, I am not the only developer who didn't initially understand the value of plugins. But I'm glad I came around because plugins are

what makes rollup and by extension vit so powerful. Like most white guys, I spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. Specifically, I think about the width of Roman war chariots like the one Charlton Hston rode in Benhur, which were made just wide enough to accommodate the backends of two horses side by side. Now, those chariots caused ruts in the road, which meant that everyone else e either had to kind of build their own chariots to the same dimensions or they would always be breaking down.

Many centuries later when the English started building railways they used the same tools they had used for building wagons which meant that railways adopted the same standard width 4 feet 8 and a half inches. This is the Stockton and Darlington railway the first ever passenger rail service which opened exactly 200 years ago. When the American rail way rails were built they naturally did the same thing. And so when engineers on the space shuttle program were designing the solid rocket boosters, the two things either side of it, which had to be transported by rail, they had to work to the same