1013: Cloudflare Acquires VoidZero

Live at JSNation in Amsterdam, Scott, Wes, and CJ break down Cloudflare’s acquisition of VoidZero, the company behind Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, and Oxc. They dig into why this is genuinely exciting, not scary, covering what it means for the open source tooling you already use, Cloudflare’s growing tip-to-tail stack, and why infrastructure might be the one thing LLMs can never sherlock Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! Live from JS Nation Amsterdam 00:35 The Big News: Cloudflare Acquires VoidZero 01:06 First Reactions: Is This a Good Thing? 01:57 Vite+ Overview: Who’s Using It 03:07 Why Would Cloudflare Want This? 03:38 The Void Framework: Cloudflare’s Vite Plugin 04:31 VoidZero’s Void Hosting Product (Built on Cloudflare) 04:53 Cloudflare Now Has Everything: Tip to Tail 05:57 What Cloudflare Is Still Missing (Auth) 06:20 Infrastructure as the Last LLM Frontier 07:27 Vendor Lock-In: The Trade-Off Worth Making? 08:09 Wrangler is Bad. 09:00 Vite’s Impact on Web Dev 09:22 AI Acquiring Engineers: What It Says About the Industry 10:10 Behind the Scenes: Who Knew Before the Announcement 10:40 Recap: Everything Stays Open Source, MIT Licensed 11:06 The $1M Vite Ecosystem Fund 11:35 Wrap Up 12:14 Brought to you by Sentry.io Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Cloudflare has acquired Void Zero and we're gonna be diving into all of that live here at JS Nation in Amsterdam.

• 0:11Wes Bos?

  I mean, this is sick. Yeah, this is great. Wicked conference. Thousands of Europeans here. It's just excellent. It's a great time. Stoked to be here, but this is fun. Look at this set. We got multiple cams. Cam 1, cam 2, cam 1, cam 2. Sorry for that edit, Randy.

• 0:29Scott Tolinski?

  CJ cam. There's three cams. And we're in the same room. That's amazing. Yes, we're all getting to actually chat here.

• 0:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 0:35Scott Tolinski?

  So the big news, obviously, that we're gonna be talking about, as we said up top, was that Cloudflare has acquired Void Zero, the creators of Void, Veet Plus, Veet, these things that we know and love.

• 0:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 0:49Scott Tolinski?

  And that's big news, even though they haven't acquired Veet itself. Veet is going to remain open source. It has its own team of collaborators.

• 0:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah, well, in fact, they've like put up a bunch of money towards the open source part. A million bucks towards it, which is awesome. So don't run to the comments just yet. I feel good about Cloudflare, the company. What do you think about them acquiring? I feel good about the future of Veet.

• 1:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah?

• 1:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I mean, I, out of all the companies that could have acquired Veet.

• 1:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Scott Tolinski?

  Or not, they didn't acquire Veet, I shouldn't say that.

• 1:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:23Scott Tolinski?

  Void, Void Zero. I mean, Cloudflare seems like the best bet to me. I have nothing but good vibes with Cloudflare personally, because I host so much stuff there. And I tend to like all their stuff. So that's just me, though, you know?

• 1:35Wes Bos?

  Yes. So let's talk about why. Like, why did they do this and why is it exciting? So Veet, we're gonna call it Veet. Everyone gets mad that they acquired Veet. We get it. It's a company called Void Zero, run by Evan Yu.

• 1:48Scott Tolinski?

  But they didn't acquire Veet.

• 1:50Wes Bos?

  They didn't.

• 1:50Scott Tolinski?

  And not the maintainers of Veet even. Just the creator.

• 1:54Wes Bos?

  Yes. Of. I think everybody understands that. But, so we talked about V Plus a couple of months ago, right? V Plus is this new CLI tool that allows you, that encompasses everything, right? You got your linting, your formatting, your building.

• 2:10Wes Bos?

  All of that in one single CLI tool, which is fantastic. I've been using it myself for all of my projects going forward.

• 2:18Scott Tolinski?

  I was gonna say, CJ, are you using Vite Plus?

• 2:20Speaker 02

  I haven't yet. I tried it.

• 2:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  But next project I probably will. Just because it scaffolds everything, right? Like you don't have to have a separate config file for everything. It's a single config, so it seems nice. I haven't tried it yet, but it seems nice.

• 2:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I'm also using Vite Plus for everything right now. Because it was fairly trivial to switch over. And any new projects, I'm just defaulting to that now.

• 2:43Wes Bos?

  The only thing I don't like is that when you do VP, what is it, new or whatever? Whatever you use to scaffold the new project, there's no way to scaffold it in the current folder. It always creates a second folder. But I'll log a bug for that.

• 2:58Scott Tolinski?

  For me, I'm still waiting on full Svelte support for this

• 3:01Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01Scott Tolinski?

  OXlent and Format stuff. It's coming and it's starting to come in here. But I'm still waiting on it, like to fully replace ES Lantern.

• 3:08Wes Bos?

  So let's talk about like, why would Cloudflare even want this tooling? They could have slot-forked it. They could have just made their own. They could have like, Cloudflare itself has gotten so much better since they integrated Vite into it. They have this awesome Cloudflare Vite plugin, which allows you to access your environmental variables inside of it. You don't have to like fuss with like Webpack bundling. You can just run TypeScript directly. It's gotten quite a bit better. And Void Zero themselves have kind of launched like two things, right? They launched Vite Plus, which we talked about. And then they also were working on this product called Void, which was a way to like host or deploy applications.

• 3:53Wes Bos?

  And it was entirely built on the like Cloudflare stack.

• 3:57Scott Tolinski?

  Can we call Void a framework?

• 3:59Wes Bos?

  Yes, yeah, yeah. Void was a framework. It was a JavaScript framework that had routing.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  It still is. You're saying had, but it still is, right?

• 4:08Wes Bos?

  Well, like, the thing is, like, it was released private beta, and then they got acquired. And like, I don't know, but I doubt that they're actually going to release it. Because the thing was that it was all built on top of of Cloudflare, but from asking them, it didn't seem like the idea was that you could just use this tool to deploy to your own Cloudflare.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 4:27Wes Bos?

  It was that they were building their own cloud on top of of Cloudflare.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:31Wes Bos?

  Right, a cloud.

• 4:32Scott Tolinski?

  But the the framework components, the routing.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  That's so.

• 4:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, DB stuff. I don't think that's going anywhere.

• 4:39Wes Bos?

  Well.

• 4:39Scott Tolinski?

  Like, when when they first told us about it.

• 4:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Scott Tolinski?

  And how integrated it wasn't at Cloudflare, my first thought was they're going to be acquired.

• 4:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Right, I think both of you guys have called it.

• 4:50Scott Tolinski?

  Built.

• 4:50Wes Bos?

  They're making something that Cloudflare wants.

• 4:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Wes Bos?

  Because now that Cloudflare has acquired them, they have everything. Front end framework, you know, you can, of course, use Salt or or React or whatever, but also they have their own thing. Back end, you can use Vue, yeah, I'm sure I hear it works with with V with V. They got database, caching, key value, off, images, video. Like, we're trying to, we were talking before, it's like, what doesn't Cloudflare have now?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they got queues.

• 5:23Wes Bos?

  Queues, durable objects, real time.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Real time.

• 5:27Wes Bos?

  Some of the stuff is like you have to do it the weird Cloudflare way.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:30Wes Bos?

  Um, but.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  It's kind of one stop shop. I, yeah, I mentioned they don't have an like off platform, like you can't host your users there, you still might be using something else.

• 5:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, they have like Cloudflare Access.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:41Wes Bos?

  Which is kind of, like, I use it as an off thing to to guard a lot of mass. It's more, I don't know, it's that kind of a mix between like tail scale. You could certainly use it for your applications.

• 5:52Scott Tolinski?

  Probably wouldn't.

• 5:53Wes Bos?

  But like, no, you're probably still reaching for like a better off, something like that.

• 5:57Scott Tolinski?

  And better off is cooked into void, so.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 6:01Wes Bos?

  Exactly. So they they have tip to tail.

• 6:04Scott Tolinski?

  I was gonna say.

• 6:05Wes Bos?

  All the pieces.

• 6:06Scott Tolinski?

  Is this tip to tail?

• 6:07Wes Bos?

  This is.

• 6:07Scott Tolinski?

  Is it a one stop shop? Is it, uh, what are some other ones?

• 6:10Wes Bos?

  Vegan tip to tail equivalent.

• 6:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 6:12Wes Bos?

  Farm to table.

• 6:13Scott Tolinski?

  From root to leaf.

• 6:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  From, yeah, root to leaf.

• 6:17Wes Bos?

  From root to leaf, okay, they have all the pieces, and I I think that's exciting because OpenAI, a couple of weeks or last week, launched this thing called OpenAI Sites, which essentially is like.

• 6:28Scott Tolinski?

  Hey.

• 6:29Wes Bos?

  You can, you can make a site and you can deploy, and it deploys to Cloudflare. Because Cloudflare has all the pieces, and now Cloudflare has. Tip to tail, all the pieces, it's a nice tidy package that they can just hand over to an LLM and say like, "Build me something, deploy the thing, use my access." You don't have to like, reach outside to any sort of third-party service. And I think that like, infrastructure is like, the last thing that the these LLM companies have not come for. And I don't know if they'll ever be able to come for it because it's a lot easier to like, vibe code a some software versus like, scaling infrastructure across all the governments and countries of the world.

• 7:13Scott Tolinski?

  But you'd have to think that with the current way things are working, uh, root to leaf, you would be able to use an LLM to say, "Build me a site with this stack," and it's got everything.

• 7:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Scott Tolinski?

  One-stop shop.

• 7:27Wes Bos?

  One-stop shop.

• 7:28Scott Tolinski?

  Tip to tail.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the biggest sell is like, obviously, we've talked about before, it's vendor lock-in.

• 7:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  But, and that might be a good thing because they have everything you need. So like, you're not gonna have to shop around, you're not gonna have to find different libraries and try to integrate them.

• 7:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  You use the Void framework, you have access to all the infrastructure. I think for anybody that's already using Cloudflare, this seems like a no-brainer.

• 7:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and for people who don't even know what Cloudflare is, they just type in the box.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:55Wes Bos?

  "Make me a site."

• 7:56Speaker 02

  It's, and like, I think the best analogy is like, it's the new Vercel. Like, Vercel made it easy to deploy backend apps.

• 8:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  And now, Void with Cloudflare is doing the same thing, but on Cloudflare instead of on AWS.

• 8:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Wes Bos?

  So, the other thing is that the Cloudflare has been working on their new CLI. Because Cloudflare CLI Wrangler, absolute dog. Like, it's kinda hard to use, you know?

• 8:20Scott Tolinski?

  If anybody was thinking that this episode was a, just a total Cloudflare love fest.

• 8:26Wes Bos?

  No, no, I've got, I've got things to say.

• 8:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Wes Bos?

  No, and they know that because they've been working on a new CLI called CF that does everything in Cloudflare. So you don't have to, like, with Wrangler, sometimes you have to like, go to the GUI and select things, and then you gotta go back to the thing. And then, sometimes if you do something in the UI, but then you push something Your config file, it overrides that.

• 8:49Scott Tolinski?

  It happens every time.

• 8:51Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's just like, no, that's a weird thing. And like, who's better at writing CLIs than the V team, right? They, V has been such a blessing to the web development scene of just making this frustrating hard stuff delightful and easy to use.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:12Wes Bos?

  And like, now I hope they do that to the CloudFlare CLI.

• 9:16Scott Tolinski?

  CloudFlare's got a crazy roster of talented people now.

• 9:20Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 9:21Scott Tolinski?

  Holy cow. If you add Evan to that mix.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:24Scott Tolinski?

  Like, wow.

• 9:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah, they've been cooking.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  It's a testament to good engineering, too. Like, for the past four years, whatever, we've been saying, like, the programming is dead, but you see big companies like this acquiring really talented engineers. Like, we still need really talented engineers.

• 9:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we don't need the shitty ones like us, but they need the good ones.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean.

• 9:44Wes Bos?

  For now, at least.

• 9:45Scott Tolinski?

  What's on non-notice here?

• 9:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  It keeps me hopeful, because, I mean, so like Anthropic acquiring Bun and getting access to Jared Sumner, like all the talent of the Bun team. So, it's interesting to see, it's like, they're saying one thing, it's going to replace developers, yet they're hiring developers and spending a lot of money to do it, so.

• 10:04Wes Bos?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Something to think about.

• 10:07Scott Tolinski?

  It's food for thought.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Food for thought.

• 10:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. So, the deal was announced in June 4th. Do we know anything about the deal?

• 10:15Wes Bos?

  No, no, I tried, I poked out a couple of them, but they did not spill the beans. But, I was, luckily, I knew about this before a lot of the folks at CloudFlare knew about it, which was kind of exciting.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:28Wes Bos?

  So.

• 10:28Scott Tolinski?

  How did that happen?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Well, don't get anybody in trouble.

• 10:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I don't want to get anybody in trouble, no, I'm not, not revealing my sources. But, yeah, that's good.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 10:40Wes Bos?

  I think that's it.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:41Wes Bos?

  So you want to wrap it up?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll reiterate. So like Veet, Vitest, RollDown, Oxi, Veet Plus, all of that still open source. They basically acquired some of the core maintainers that were working on it because they were hired by V0, but all of that's still open source, still MIT licensed. Like, none of that is owned by Cloudflare. They're just paying the developers that are working on it a decent salary.

• 11:02Scott Tolinski?

  The Veet core team not acquired.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Right, right, exactly.

• 11:05Scott Tolinski?

  Because Veet is separate, yes.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  And so, and that's the other news, like a million dollar, what do they call it? That Veet ecosystem fund. So they didn't acquire that team, but a million dollars is going to the maintainers, anybody else working on it.

• 11:18Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, man, a million dollars can buy a little bit of maintenance.

• 11:20Wes Bos?

  I have a couple of Veet plugins. Maybe I could get like...

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Get some money.

• 11:22Wes Bos?

  Like a hundred K. I would take a hundred K for my like directory listing plugin.

• 11:26Scott Tolinski?

  You think they're gonna give you a hundred?

• 11:28Wes Bos?

  Or I have like a port killing plugin for Veet. Or like if something's running on the port, it'll automatically kill it.

• 11:35Wes Bos?

  I would take a hundred K for that one too. So maybe like, maybe I'll dip into this fund.

• 11:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Wes Bos?

  For the ecosystem.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  For the ecosystem.

• 11:41Scott Tolinski?

  I know, I do have a Veet one that is a custom DSL plugin for a DSL that went nowhere and I have to support because I use it on my personal website instead of just using one of the community ones.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  But, yeah.

• 11:54Wes Bos?

  Beautiful.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  It mentioned in their post, but also say it, that like Veet still runs everywhere. That's why we love Veet from the beginning, kind of like unified the build process, made it super easy to build apps. That's not tied to Cloudflare. You can still use it to build your app, deploy it or sell, like manually run your own server.

• 12:12Wes Bos?

  For now.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  For now.

• 12:13Scott Tolinski?

  So, we have experience with this. Syntax acquired by Sentry.

• 12:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:19Scott Tolinski?

  And that was part of the hardest thing of the messaging to let everyone know Sentry's not controlling syntax. We are controlling syntax. Our message won't change. The only thing is we won't be sponsored anymore. And I remember there was a huge amount of stress around that announcement because we didn't want people to get the wrong impression.

• 12:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Yeah, you can tell that the Veet team was very clear about like, it's not happening anywhere.

• 12:44Scott Tolinski?

  So I would, I would encourage people not to jump to conclusions about that.

• 12:49Wes Bos?

  Talk about the opposite, though. If they were to like try to make money off of V, what would they do?

• 12:53Scott Tolinski?

  They'd turn it orange.

• 12:55Wes Bos?

  They would, no. They would charge for variables. So, on the team plan, var free, let, you get 200 a month. And only 50 cons. You know, you want immutability? That's an enterprise feature.

• 13:09Scott Tolinski?

  Enterprise, yes, yes.

• 13:11Wes Bos?

  I think like, what else would, what else could you do?

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, bundle size.

• 13:17Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you want it smaller? Pass.

• 13:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:20Wes Bos?

  You can only, you can only do like two bundles, or like, um, like a 100 millisecond delay in, in hot reloading. You know, remove that, extra 100 bucks a month.

• 13:30Scott Tolinski?

  Or you could have it play a short ad while you're hot reloading.

• 13:35Wes Bos?

  Yes. Hot reload, throw an ad up there.

• 13:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Wes Bos?

  You know, JS Nation tickets.

• 13:40Scott Tolinski?

  The latest.

• 13:41Wes Bos?

  JS Nation would probably, probably pay for that.

• 13:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  All this is gonna get clipped out of context, and they're not gonna know that we're joking.

• 13:49Wes Bos?

  V is going paid.

• 13:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so, folks, what's, what's the vibe? Leave comments below. Let us know what the vibe is around this stuff. I personally have positive feelings about all of this, so let us know what you think.

• 14:02Wes Bos?

  I'm gonna fork it into wheat.

• 14:04Scott Tolinski?

  I was gonna say, what would the vibe slop name be? Wheat?

• 14:08Wes Bos?

  Veet, meat.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Wheaties?

• 14:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, well, it has to be, what's a cloud version of Veet? Yes, I don't know. Veet is now cloud? Cloud now?

• 14:17Wes Bos?

  Veeter, or better Veet.

• 14:19Scott Tolinski?

  Better Veet, yes.

• 14:21Wes Bos?

  I'm sure they have trademark on them. Can you trademark the word Veet, though? I think you can, in the like tooling space.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:28Wes Bos?

  Alright, cool.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  That's all we got.

• 14:29Wes Bos?

  Alright, thanks for tuning in, folks. Peace.