tools VS parcel

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

Homepage: https://parceljs.org/

In the Changelog Podcast episode referenced above, Dan Abramov alluded to Parcel working on RSC support as well. I couldn’t find much to back up that claim aside from a GitHub issue discussing directives and a social media post by Devon Govett (creator of Parcel), so I can’t say for sure if Parcel is currently a viable option for developing with RSCs.

Parcel 2 emphasizes a zero-configuration approach to bundling web applications. It's a powerful tool that offers a hassle-free developer experience, focusing on simplicity and speed.

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.

Parcel

I’ve tried something similar on the frontend side: I decided to build a UI for Ollama.ai using only HTML, CSS, and JS (Single-Page Application). The goal is to learn something new and have zero runtime dependencies on other projects and NPM modules. Only Node and Parcel.js (https://parceljs.org/) are needed during development for serving files, bundling, etc. The only runtime dependency is a modern browser.

Here's what I have found so far:

- JavaScript (vanilla) is a viable alternative to React.js

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.

In the Node.js ecosystem, bundling is typically handled by third-party tools rather than Node.js itself. Some of the most popular bundlers in the Node.js world include Webpack, Rollup, and Parcel, offering features like code splitting, tree shaking, and hot module replacement.

There are projects attempting to do more things. I've really enjoyed Parcel (https://parceljs.org). But it won't handle things like linting or unit testing, which you may or may not want. Vite is also pretty popular (https://vitejs.dev/), and it has a test runner.

Thing is, most of the problems described in the post aren't related to low-JS front-end libraries like HTMX or alpine. You can write React without a linter, bundler, build tool, unit testing, or linting. But with any of these projects at scale, you start wanting more:

- If you want to write unit tests in JS, you need to choose a test runner (probably Jest or Vitest -- until the built-in node testing module becomes more common).

- If you want linting, you need a linter (probably Eslint). If you want type safety, you need a type checker (probably Typescript).

- If you want to create smaller JS files to ship to production and to automatically handle assets, you need a bundler.

- If you want to use new language features while supporting old browsers, you need polyfills.

- If you want to use all these things together, you need something to bring it together (like Webpack).

So it really depends what you need! You may not need any. But as you can imagine, in many professional projects with multiple developers it's very nice to have unit tests, linting, and type checking :) (And you start caring about end-user performance a lot more, in which case optimizing the shipped bundle is important.)

Take all that, and then compare to a language like Rust, which has most of the "ecosystem stuff" built-in. In Rust, you get the test runner, the linter, dependency manager, type checker, and documentation tool all included. Easy! Thankfully, Rust doesn't have to care about whether users support modern language features (because it compiles down to lower code ahead of time), or whether the binary shipped to the client is optimally organized for downloading immediately over the internet.

It's a problem in JS because A) you have to care about more problems than many other languages since JS needs to load instantly over the wire in a web browser, and B) there is a huge amount of choice and not a lot of standardization in web tools. (And what standardization there is (Node, npm), there are still competitors trying to even further reduce the pain points.)

I think that in ten more years, we'll be in a better place, because there is push back (like this post!) against these problems, which will encourage more tools trying to solve the explosion of tools. Which seems counterintuitive, but these tools were created to solve very real problems. So I see it as a pendulum which has swung too far, but will likely swing back to a more balanced place. And you see that with tools like Vite gaining popularity.

My first challenge here was the migration from vanilla JS to utilizing tools like Parcel and React. React, I was a bit familiar with; however, I had never heard of Parcel.js in my life. Several days were spent troubleshooting why my build process was not working on Netlify before I finally found out that I had to set up my Netlify Build Settings specifically for using a bundler like Parcel.js