tools VS esbuild

Biome is a fork of Rome, which was originally an ambitious tool written in Rust but abandoned in October 2023. It includes both a linter and a formatter, putting an end to the time-consuming difficulties associated with reconciling ESLint and Prettier rules.

When I saw the release of bun six months ago, I was not that hyped as I saw a tool that had similar ambitions, Rome, and dissapointed many. But it was different this time. It really is a drop in replacement for Node.js so you can start using it by replacing the npm and node commands in your package.json file. The main feature that captured my interest was the ability to use require and import statemtents in the same file. This allows you to keep using CommonJS modules and use import statemtents for any new modules that drop support for it. The only catch I could find so far is that if you decide to mix import and require statements, you cannot use module.exports but instead use export statement. I did exactly that and now I have a fully functional backend with admin panel that won't make your head scratch fighting with CommonJS and ESModules.

Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.

It definitely existed by the time rome_console/biome_console was created! The crate was created 2 years ago[1] and miette was released more than 2 years ago[2]. By the time rome_console was created miette was on v4, so presumably somewhat mature.

[1]: https://github.com/rome/tools/commits/main/crates/rome_conso...

[2]: https://crates.io/crates/miette/versions

Biome formats and lints your JavaScript and TypeScript code in a fraction of a second. Biome is the community successor of Rome Tools [0].

As part of this announcement, we have released the first stable version of Biome [1]. Join us on our Discord [2] and support us via our open collective [3].

I am one of the main maintainers of Biome. I will be happy to answer any questions :)

[0] https://github.com/rome/tools

I have no idea how true this is, but the source of the claim seems to come from here:

https://github.com/rome/tools/discussions/4302

"But in short, the company Rome Tools ran out of funding, so the core team of last year are no longer working on the project."

For now, Rome implements most of the ESLint recommended rules (including TypeScript ESLint) and some additional rules that are enabled by default. In the future, you can expect a recommended preset that is a superset of the ESLint recommended preset. So if you're not heavily customising ESLint, you should be able to use Rome.

Otherwise, most of the rules are not fine-tunable in the way that ESLint is. Rome tries to provide the experience that Prettier provided in the formatting tool: good defaults for a near-zero configuration experience. It tries to adopt the conventions of the JS/TS community. Still, some configuration is provided when the community is divided on some opinions (e.g. space vs. tab indentation, semicolons or as-needed semicolons, ...).

There is an open issue [1] for listing equivalent rules between ESLint and Rome. Expect more documentation in the future, and maybe a migration tool.

If I had been one of the founders of Rome, I could have pushed for more compatibility with ESLint. In particular, using the same naming conventions and thus the same names for most rules, and recognising ESLint ignore comments.

[1] https://github.com/rome/tools/issues/3892

Today we are going to talk about Rome. According to their github page

I must say, although it doesn't (of course) have anywhere near the configuration or plugin-capability of eslint, I've found Rome impressive so far. I have access to a range of PCs and the performance boost of a compiled binary makes a pretty big difference on a large repo on a slower machine.

Fast compilation seems very appealing. It is one of the main reason why I am interested into Go and Zig.

I recently started working with Rust for contributing to projects like Rome/tools [1] and deno_lint [2]. The compilation and IDE experience is frustrating. Compilation is slow. I am afraid that this is rooted to the inherent complexity of Rust.

[1] https://github.com/rome/tools

[2] https://github.com/denoland/deno_lint

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.