Trying out a new developer Biome (get it?!)

These days at work, I’m responsible for maintaining a new global common header. It’s built with web components using Microsoft FAST elements and TypeScript, with ESLint for linting and formatting. The setup is pretty bog-standard, and really common these days. Visual Studio Code offers Intellisense for TypeScript and JavaScript out of the box, but adding ESLint for TypeScript requires adding a few other packages to your project. Which may not be the end of the world, but it does mean more dependencies to download and manage, which inherently chips away at the developer experience.

An alternative to ESLint I’ve started trying out is Biome.js. The history behind this package is fascinating. Long story short, Biome is a fork of Rome Tools, a project promising an all-in-one JavaScript ecosystem that was unfortunately plagued with issues and eventually abandoned. Biome is still aims to provide that complete ecosystem with linting and formatting for many flavors of JavaScript built-in including TypeScript. This means no ESLint-specific dependencies and plugins just to have TypeScript in the environment.

For my particular project, implementing Biome meant replacing all of this…:

@typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin:    2.680MB
@typescript-eslint/parser       :    0.018MB
eslint-plugin-headers           :    0.052MB
eslint-config-airbnb-base       :    0.094MB
eslint                          :    3.030MB
____________________________________________

Total size of files             :    5.874MB

…with just this…:

@biomejs/biome                  :    0.130MB

…and effectively getting the same thing.

All of the packages I get to remove are just developer dependencies and won’t directly affect the end user’s experience, but the difference and benefits are still pretty significant. Considering the primary consumer of this packages are product teams looking to maintain consistent branding, this change means less code for them to download and install. It also means less surface areas for potential issues and threats, which translates to Dependabot having less to scan and fret over.

I highly encourage developers working with ESLint to take a look. Your milage may vary, of course, and I’m still testing it before merging it into the project, but it’s that much less to worry about installing every time.