Evan You on Vue.js, Vercel, and the Future of JavaScript Tooling

An in-depth conversation with the creator of Vue.js and Vite, covering his journey from Google to founding Void Zero, the philosophy behind Vue's evolution, and the next generation of developer tools.

Key Insights

Vue 3.6 will feature a new, backwards-compatible reactivity system called "Alien Signals," offering best-in-class performance.
"Vapor Mode" is an optional, highly performant compilation strategy for Vue that ditches the Virtual DOM.
Vite was born from a desire for faster development server startup and Hot Module Replacement (HMR).
Evan You intentionally keeps Vue.js independent from his new company, Void Zero, to ensure its community-driven nature.
Void Zero's commercial product, V+, will use a licensing model focused on enterprise monetization while remaining free for most developers.

From Art History to Google Creative Lab

Evan You's path into software development was unconventional. Holding an undergraduate degree in Art History, he later pursued a Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology. It was during this program that he grew frustrated with compiled languages like C++ for interactive projects and discovered the potential of JavaScript through Google's "Chrome Experiments."

A JavaScript clone of the "Clear" todo app demo built with HTML, CSS, and JS caught the attention of recruiters. This led him to Google Creative Lab, an internal creative agency, where he worked as a "Creative Technologist" building rapid prototypes and experimental interactions, often using cutting-edge browser APIs available only in Chrome Canary.

The Birth of Vue.js: A Desire for Simplicity

At Google, building complex UI prototypes with vanilla JavaScript or jQuery became tedious. While exploring solutions like Backbone and AngularJS, Evan found them overly complex for his needs. He wanted a simpler way to sync a template with its data.

The key insight was using ES5's `Object.defineProperty` to intercept getter and setter operations, enabling a reactive system that automatically tracked dependencies and updated the view. This core idea, focused on simplicity and a gentle learning curve, became Vue.js.

The framework gained significant traction early on within the Laravel community after a tweet from Taylor Otwell, which Evan credits as a major catalyst for its initial growth.

Vue 3 and the Composition API

As applications built with Vue grew larger and more complex, the Options API showed limitations in code organization and reusability, especially with multiple mixins. The Composition API was introduced to solve these scaling problems.

It offers two primary advantages:

Better Logic Reuse and Organization: It allows developers to encapsulate and colocate logic, making it easier to extract and refactor code in large codebases.
Superior TypeScript Support: The Options API's design made type inference incredibly complex. The Composition API, being based on plain functions, is naturally type-friendly.

Evan emphasizes that the Options API is not deprecated and will remain a supported part of Vue forever, catering to different use cases and preferences.

What's New in Vue 3.6: Alien Signals & Vapor Mode

Vue 3.6 continues the focus on performance and stability. The release will include two significant features:

Alien Signals: A new, backwards-compatible reactivity implementation that is currently the fastest in its class according to benchmarks. This is an internal refactor that provides performance gains with zero code changes for existing users. It also serves as the reference implementation for a TC39 proposal to standardize signals in JavaScript.
Vapor Mode: An optional compilation strategy that compiles Vue components into highly optimized JavaScript, bypassing the Virtual DOM entirely. It requires using a narrower subset of Vue (SFCs, `