Astro 7.0 Ships Rust Compiler and Vite 8, Builds Run 15-61% Faster

Astro 7.0 shipped on June 22 with a Rust compiler, Vite 8, and a native Markdown engine. Build times dropped 15 to 61 percent across real world sites. The Astro docs site, all 6,313 pages of it, went from 114 seconds to 73.

The .astro compiler, previously written in Go, is now built on Oxc for parsing and Lightning CSS for scoping. It ships native binaries with a WASM fallback. Markdown processing moves from the unified/remark/rehype pipeline to Sätteri, a Rust processor using pulldown-cmark. Most plugin features (GFM tables, smart punctuation, heading IDs, math, frontmatter) are now built in. If you still depend on a specific remark plugin, you can opt back into the old pipeline via @astrojs/markdown-remark.

Vite 8 arrives bundled with Astro 7, carrying Rolldown, a Rust based bundler that replaces both esbuild and Rollup. Benchmarks put Rolldown at 10 to 30 times faster than Rollup, and a compatibility layer auto converts your existing esbuild and rollupOptions config. The rendering engine also got rebuilt: the new queued renderer is stable and roughly 2.4 times faster on expression dense pages.

Advanced routing, using a src/fetch.ts entry point with the standard fetch handler pattern, is now stable. Route caching graduated from experimental too, with CDN cache provider support for Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare. If you are on Astro 6, the upgrade is documented and straightforward for most projects. The Rust compiler and Vite 8 upgrades are the kind of change you feel immediately on every save.