Weird polyfill issue that causes only production builds to work, but not dev builds

[chen-anders]

Describe the bug

We have a legacy JS script that is used as a media chooser (e.g. an API call is made to get a list of medias and they can choose one - think of it as a fancy selector). One issue that we faced with rolldown-vite coming from vite/rollup is that it seems like vite-plugin-node-polyfills builds the dev artifact with the necessary polyfills included. However, when using rolldown-vite and https://github.com/rolldown/rolldown-plugin-node-polyfills, we end up in a weird situation where the prod build work perfectly fine, but the dev builds don't work because there's no polyfills.

For this JS script, we compile it manually and access it via a separate HTTP server (instead of the vite dev server), we would expect the behavior to be the same across rolldown-vite and vite+rollup despite the fact that the Vite site mentions that Vite doesn't intentionally load polyfills in dev.

Version of rolldown-vite: 7.1.7

I'm opening this issue because I'm kind of at a dead-end at what I should look at next.

Reproduction

N/A

Steps to reproduce

No response

System Info

System:
    OS: macOS 15.6.1
    CPU: (8) arm64 Apple M1
    Memory: 88.06 MB / 16.00 GB
    Shell: 5.9 - /bin/zsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 22.12.0 - ~/.asdf/installs/nodejs/22.12.0/bin/node
    Yarn: 4.9.2 - ~/code/wistia/node_modules/.bin/yarn
    npm: 10.9.3 - ~/code/wistia/node_modules/.bin/npm
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 140.0.7339.133
    Safari: 18.6
  npmPackages:
    @vitejs/plugin-react: ^5.0.2 => 5.0.2
    rolldown-vite:  7.1.7

Used Package Manager

yarn

Logs

No response

Validations

• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs and the Rolldown-related guide.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

[sapphi-red]

You can use vite-plugin-node-polyfills with rolldown-vite. Did you try that?
rolldown-plugin-node-polyfills doesn't work in dev because Vite handles dev in a different way.

[chen-anders]

Oddly enough, while this didn't work at first, I think this works now because we had some issue with an underlying dependency being CJS instead of ESM, which we've now swapped out.

In the meantime, we've also kind of worked around the whole issue by effectively generating a production build in dev, but skipping the minification step + generating sourcemaps.

Appreciate the quick response!