Make @swc/core as a peer dependency

[ha1fstack]

Related plugins

• plugin-react

• plugin-react-swc

• plugin-react-oxc

• plugin-rsc

Describe the bug

@swc/core doesn't follow semver but vite-plugin-react is using caret version.

This could silently break when plugin-react-swc is packaged together with swc plugins.

For example, @swc/core@1.13.5 is only compatible with @swc/plugin-emotion@^11
(https://plugins.swc.rs/versions/range/426)

but the caret ^1.13.5 installs latest version on fresh install which breaks plugin compatibility.

To fix this we have to override the version or modify the lockfile manually which is not a great experience.

There could be two options:

• fix the version
• make it as a peer dependency

I think latter one makes more sense since swc's javascript interface is mostly consistent.

Related code

https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-react/blob/main/packages/plugin-react-swc/package.json

Used Package Manager

yarn

Logs

No response

Validations

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• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

[ArnaudBarre]

Yeah given the instability of the plugin system of SWC, I think it would be better to give back control on the SWC version given that package override is not trivial. I opened vitejs/vite-plugin-react-swc#206 a long time ago (before repo were merged) but I was never really happy about it so it was never merged.
This would be a breaking change to ask users to install swc themself, but we can consider it in the next major (if we do one for Vite 8 for ex.)

[sapphi-red]

It seems SWC made the plugins forward-compatible in the latest version (v1.15.0).
https://blog.swc.rs/2025-11-4-wasm-backward-compatibility

So I guess after the next version of plugin-swc, we won't have this problem anymore.

[ha1fstack]

Wow what a change, pain for an eternity finally resolved 🥲