Rust Toolchain 'Oxc' Delivers 40x Faster Linting

Oxc, short for Oxidation Compiler, is a suite of JavaScript tools written in Rust, created by Boshen Chen. It is financially backed by VoidZero Inc., a company founded by Vue.js creator Evan You, which aims to build the next generation of JavaScript tooling. Oxc is designed as a collection of modular components, including a parser, linter (Oxlint), formatter (Oxfmt), and more, that can be used together or individually. The dramatic speed improvements from tools like Oxc are attributed to Rust's performance characteristics and a smarter architecture. Unlike ESLint, which runs on a single thread, Oxlint is multi-threaded by default, utilizing all available CPU cores. Furthermore, Oxc employs a shared parser, meaning code is analyzed once and the resulting Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) is used by all tools in the suite, eliminating the redundant parsing that occurs when using separate tools like ESLint and Prettier. Oxlint benchmarks show it performing 50 to 100 times faster than ESLint. In one real-world example on a large codebase, Oxlint finished in 499ms while ESLint took over 31 seconds. Its formatter, Oxfmt, is benchmarked at over 30 times the speed of Prettier. This level of performance has led to adoption by companies like Shopify, Preact, and ByteDance. The shift to Rust for JavaScript tooling is a broader industry trend addressing performance bottlenecks in large-scale web development. For years, the ecosystem relied on tools built in JavaScript, which struggled with the demands of modern monorepos and complex CI pipelines. Projects like SWC, Turbopack, and Biome represent a similar move toward using high-performance languages to build developer tools. Oxc's linter aims for broad compatibility with existing ESLint rules, including built-in support for plugins covering React, Next.js, and imports, simplifying configuration. The formatter, Oxfmt, is being built with Prettier compatibility as a primary goal. This focus on compatibility is intended to allow for gradual adoption and easier migration from established toolchains. The long-term vision for Oxc is to provide a unified, high-performance toolchain that powers other key infrastructure. It is already being used as the foundation for Rolldown, the Rust-based bundler intended to become the future core of the popular build tool Vite. This deep integration aims to bring consistent performance gains across the entire development stack.