Taming JavaScript Complexity: The Artisan of the Day Is Evan You.
You wouldn’t guess that the creator of Vue.js and Vite, two essential pieces of the modern JavaScript ecosystem, has actually started his path to becoming one of JS’s most influential developers with a degree in Art History. But that’s precisely Evan You’s career foundation.
After graduating from college, he enrolled in Parsons' Master of Fine Arts program for Design and Technology, where he played with various technologies and discovered his love for JavaScript.
His professional journey took him through Google Creative Lab, where he spent two years hacking on experimental UI prototypes for various Google products, and then to Meteor Development Group as a core developer. Since 2016, he's been working as an independent open source developer, and recently founded VoidZero, a company building the next generation toolchain for JavaScript and TypeScript.
As part of the Laravel Community, he believes in recognizing good ideas early. Taylor's 2015 tweet about Vue came when the framework was doing just 1,800 weekly downloads. Today, it's at seven million.
Vue, Vite, and the Future of JavaScript: A Talk About Ecosystem Evolution
At Laracon US 2025, Evan showed how far Vue and the JavaScript ecosystem have come and where they're headed next.
His return to Laracon after six years revealed staggering growth: Vue now has over two million users worldwide, 250,000 GitHub stars, and more than one billion monthly CDN (content delivery network) requests. But the numbers only tell part of the story.
His key highlights:
- Vue's stability focus: No Vue 4 planned. Vue 3 code should work the same way 5-10 years from now because ecosystem stability matters more than breaking changes.
- Vapor Mode revolution: A new compilation approach that makes Vue as fast as Solid and Svelte while keeping the same API, reducing bundle size to just 7 KB.
- Signals convergence: The entire JavaScript ecosystem (except React) is converging on the same reactive paradigm, with Vue 3.6 featuring the fastest signals implementation in existence.
- Vite's dominance: Vite just overtook Webpack in weekly downloads (23 million vs. Webpack's numbers), proving Evan's 2021 prediction that people mocked him for.
The VoidZero vision:
Evan's company is building a unified JavaScript toolchain from the ground up. Instead of patching together different parsers, bundlers, and transformers, they're creating Oxc (a Rust-based language toolchain), Rolldown (a bundler combining the best of ESBuild, Rollup, and Webpack), and Vite Plus (a unified development toolchain for the web).
Early results are striking: production builds are getting 3x-16x faster, with Linear reporting 6.5x faster builds for their 20-megabyte JavaScript application.
Evan ended his Laracon talk with the promise that all these improvements would be drop-in replacements. There will be no source code changes, just faster builds and better performance.
Your Story Belongs Here
You don't need to have a course, a talk, or a big launch. If Laravel has been part of your journey (a pivot, a side project, a moment of growth), we'd love to hear about it!
Answer Taylor’s questions at laravel.com/stories.
We're always looking to feature developers from every corner of the community. Beginners, builders, behind-the-scenes folks. If Laravel helped you do something you're proud of, that's a story worth telling.