[JimDabell]

The website doesn’t tell me why I would use this instead of just Rolldown.

The “What is tsdown” link goes to a video with pre-roll ads.

I put the video URL into Gemini and asked it what it does. Gemini hallucinated a comparison with Rspack.

I followed the link to documentation from the YouTube description and it took me back to the main page that does not have a description of what it does.

There is an FAQ with a single question:

> Will tsdown support stub mode (similar to unbuild)?

Is there any kind of text description available for what this is and why I – as somebody who is currently writing a lot of front-end code – should care?

[TheAlexLichter]

Good point! Will improve this.

Think of it as in opinionated Rolldown-"preset" for libraries. It will be used as the foundation of Vite's lib mode revamp.

[typpilol]

Afaict, it seems like a rust build on top of oxc and roll down?

But again, all it says is it's fast. And vite is pretty damn fast and widely supported so?

Plus vite exposes roll down config options so yea, what's the point?

[frankdejonge]

I use it to compile backend code. For those use-cases, IMO, vite itself is not so interesting (although I do use vitest). Using tsdown gives me a simplified API to compile my BE code so I can publish it to NPM. Nothing more nothing less. It’s faster and less work to orchestrate using TSC for CJS and ESM output, so very high ROI for me.