Differences between oxlint and biome?

[mcmxcdev]

I am following along the progress of oxlint and rome/biome for a while now and would like to understand why both tools, which are so similiar in philosopy are being developed as separate standalone tools.

According to https://npmtrends.com/@biomejs/biome-vs-oxlint, biome has 91k downloads per week while oxlint has 25k downloads per week, both tools are built in Rust, reimplement various ESLint rules and are probably encountering similar bugs and problems too.

I think it would be great to combine biome and oxlint into one, leading to higher velocity, more developer activity and less ecosystem fragmentation where devs have to get informed about both and pick one over the other for reason x or y.

[Boshen]

Give both a try and see which one fits your requirements. Biomes excel in every aspect at the moment.

[alexleduc76]

@iwt-nduesing I would just shut down the discussion if anyone tried to challenge the formatting rules. The lead developer should make these decisions, and they should not be up for debate.

I have not missed the argument that Prettier's imposed formatting stops such discussions, but I disagree that it does. Someone could disagree just as much with the Prettier imposed formatting than the one I impose with ESLint rules, and argue that we should use another tool than Prettier for that reason. Prettier is not what shuts down formatting debates, it's the responsibility of the person with the authority to make those decisions.

[nicod-pc]

@alexleduc76 well, not everyone works in a top down hierarchy organization. This is the first time for years I see someone arguing for using a different tool than prettier for formatting, because they don't like their rules.

[Zwyx]

@alexleduc76, I know someone who is very much against Prettier, for the reasons you state. This is not well seen by many others, especially new devs joining their team.

In your article, you mention Who are the opinionated formatter's authors to decide what's best for everyone else?. I believe this is not how Prettier was made: Prettier's default config is the result of hundreds of developers debating in thousands of GitHub issues in order to find the best common rules for everyone. (And it offers configuration options for the points about which the debates couldn't reach a conclusion.)

Prettier is considered by many to be the standard of web development (10M projects using it).

So maybe we could reverse your question: are you sure it's up to you to decide that your personal preferences are better for the people in your team than the standard developed by the web community?

(Edit: just a note, if you have set up your ESLint to not put orange squiggles everywhere and to automatically format the code (essentially reproducing Prettier's behaviour), then that's pretty good. The problem, in many places refusing Prettier, is that automation is very bad, and PRs get dozens of useless comments about formatting.)

[alexleduc76]

@Zwyx Well, now that ESLint has moved the formatting rules to a separate repo, we can know how much using custom formatting rules matter to other developers (VS using ESLint strictly as a linter).

According to NPM, @stylistic/eslint-plugin is downloaded 1.4 million times per week. This means there are 1.4 million new projects per week that explicitly dislike the standard imposed by opinionated formatters, since there is no other reason to use that package. It doesn't look like code formatting is a settled debate at all.

[Zwyx]

Thanks Alex. I see your point, however Prettier is 52M downloads per week. So 97% Prettier, 3% ESLint Stylistic. I'm not sure at which point we can consider a debate settled, but at least we can say there is a clear preference.

(And that doesn't count the projects using Prettier but never downloading it from NPM, as the VS Code extension comes bundled with it. Personally I don't bother installing it for tiny projects, so I'd say half of what I do uses Prettier without downloading it.)

[Boshen]

Two years have passed since the previous reply.

Our formatter is now ready https://oxc.rs/docs/guide/usage/formatter.html

And I believe Oxc have excelled in most areas today.