Babel

Ladle uses @vitejs/plugin-react-swc by default. This plugin uses SWC to transform all React code and is many times faster than Babel.

If you want to use Babel instead of SWC (in case you need to apply some custom babel plugins), you can do it by installing and adding @vitejs/plugin-react into ./vite.config.js:

vite.config.js

import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react";

export default {
  plugins: [react()],
};

Ladle automatically disables the default SWC plugin.

SWC is up to 20x faster than Babel and can supercharge your development experience. The only downside is that you can't utilize a rich ecosystem of Babel plugins if your project uses a special syntax. However, there are also a few SWC plugins and there is a plugin API so you can write your own.