The first stable version Oxlint, a Rust-powered linter developed as part of the Oxc toolchain, has been released. The new linter promises a 50 to 100 times performance improvement over ESLint along with support for over 500 ESLint rules.

Oxlint is a Rust-powered linter for JavaScript and TypeScript that is designed to catch erroneous or useless code without requiring any configurations by default.

The developers say that at this stage, Oxlint is not intended to fully replace ESLint. Instead, it serves as an enhancement when ESLint's slowness becomes a bottleneck in your workflow. Introducing the new linter when it was first released in December 2023, Boshen Chen said:

"For faster feedback loops, we recommend running oxlint before ESLint in your lint-staged or CI setup, considering it only takes a few seconds to run on large codebases."

Boshen is a main developer on Oxc, a collection of high-performance tools for JavaScript and TypeScript. Oxc is an MIT licensed open source project. The Oxidation Compiler tools are written in Rust with the aim of providing faster, more reliable modular development tools. The team is building a parser, linter, formatter, transformer, minifier, and resolver. 

The developers of Oxlint say it is ideal for developers who want to start linting their code without spending hours configuring tools. With zero setup required, you can start catching issues immediately. Oxlint is, however, configurable via an .oxlintrc.json file, which is useful for larger projects or projects that require more customization. This configuration format is based on ESLint v8's flat config. The team says that for projects already using ESLint, oxlint-migrate can be used to migrate an existing ESLint flat-config file to Oxlint. 

Oxlint defaults to identifying erroneous, redundant, or confusing code. It prioritizes correctness over what the developers say are unnecessary nitpicking rules (categorized as perf, suspicious, pedantic, or style), which are disabled by default.

Oxlint is designed to be zero-config out of the box; even Node.js is not a requirement. Most adjustments can be made through the command-line, and reading from ESLint configuration file is currently a work in progress. T

Oxlint's messages have been designed to be simpler to understand than most linter messages. It pinpoints root causes and provides helpful messages. Oxlint does not provide a plugin system yet, but the team is actively consolidating rules from popular plugins like TypeScript, React, Jest, Unicorn, JSX-a11y and Import. 

Oxlint 1.0 is available now on npm.  

More Information

Oxlint On NPM

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