Evan You is the creator of the Vue project. In his VueConf talk he covers the growth of Vue, recent project releases, the maturing eco-system, the Vue-Loader rewrite, Vue CLI 3, upcoming releases of Vue.js, and initiatives to improve the stability and evolution of the library.

The Growth of Vue

Vue has seen a tremendous amount of growth recently across Github, NPM, and the Vue DevTools plugin. It was the single most starred repo on Github in 2017.

He mentions a few recent official releases:

• eslint-plugin-vue 4.0 - The official ESLint plugin which is able to catch syntax errors now inside single file Vue components.
• @vue/test-utils 1.0-beta - Established the standard for testing Vue components.
• vue-devtools - Lots of new features including the ability to edit state.
• Official Vue News - Covering the latest news in the Vue Ecosystem.

Vue has a maturing eco-system, with many projects now production ready with 1.0 releases such as Nuxt, Vutify, and NativeScript Vue.

Vue-Loader Rewrite

Vue-Loader is the webpack loader that transforms Vue single file components into different parts: template, script, and style. The original implementation was a hack, chaining all the loaders together, which contained some complexity. With a Vue-Loader rewrite, the new architecture solves this by appending a resource loader to each request.

A new library was extracted during the refactor a low level utility for compiling Vue SFCs in more than just webpack (Rollup, Jest, Parcel), called @vue/component-compiler-utils.

Vue CLI 3

Evan speaks about the new version of @vue/cli that has many improvements.

Problems with Vue CLI 2

• Templates are not upgradable
• Exposed configuration are intimidating and difficult to understand
• Template maintenance difficulty with interweaving features
• Forked templates need to constantly sync with upstream

Goals for the New Version

• Zero config by default
• Additional feature are shipped as built-in plugins
• Everything should be configurable without ejection
• Everything that isn’t build-in should also be implementable as a plugin

In the talk he walks through a demo of the new CLI, showing how you can pick the features needed for your project:

Upcoming Vue.js Releases

There are two branches of Vue.js core that are being worked on, along with a new version of Vuex.

2.6 Features

• Contains ECMAScript Modules browser build
• Better async error handling
  • Handle Promises returned from lifecycle hooks
  • $catch method for manually sending async errors to errorHandler
• Better warning output (line numbers and codeframes!)
• v-for iterator support

2.6-next Features

• Proxy-based reactivity system
• Upgrade codebase using latest ES Features
• API remains the same
• Both versions maintained in parallel

Vuex Features

• Simplify API with async/await
• Potentially eliminating the separation of actions & mutations
• New scoped-slots based usage pattern

Stability and Evolution

Evan thinks it’s is important for the future that more people contribute to Vue, and so there are a few initiatives to help this. He’s actively working to improve the governance modal, and will soon publish an RFC process. He also is creating a more predictable release schedule between major, minor and patch releases, and a clearer definition of release channels between stable, beta, nightly, and LTS.