At AckerWorx, our developers strive for code clarity, maintainability, and efficiency. Like most teams in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, we’ve relied heavily on the classic duo: ESLint for linting and Prettier for formatting. But recently, we made a bold decision: switching entirely to Biome, formerly known as Rome.
This article dives into why we made the switch, our experience migrating, the technical benefits we’ve experienced firsthand, and what you might want to consider if you’re thinking of following a similar path.
Our Previous Setup: ESLint + Prettier
ESLint and Prettier served as the foundation for maintaining code quality and consistency across our projects. ESLint helped catch potential errors, enforce best practices, and keep coding styles consistent, while Prettier automatically handled formatting, ensuring clean, uniform code.
However, as our projects and teams scaled, we encountered a few recurring issues:
- Complex Configuration: Multiple config files (
.eslintrc,.prettierrc,.eslintignore, etc.) across various repositories became tedious to manage and maintain. - Plugin Overload: ESLint’s strength—its large plugin ecosystem—also created dependency management challenges.
- Performance Bottlenecks: ESLint and Prettier’s JavaScript-based runtimes increasingly slowed down developer workflow, especially noticeable in larger repositories or monorepos.
We needed a simpler, faster, yet equally powerful solution.
Why Biome?
Unified Tooling, Less Complexity
Biome caught our attention initially due to its promise of unifying linting, formatting, and static analysis into a single fast binary. Built in Rust, Biome is specifically optimized for performance and minimalism:
- Single Dependency: Replace multiple ESLint and Prettier-related dependencies with just one (
@biomejs/biome). - Zero or Minimal Configuration: A single optional
biome.jsonfile can replace your sprawling ESLint/Prettier configuration files.
This significantly reduced the complexity we faced in our existing setup.
Performance: Rust-Powered Efficiency
Biome’s Rust foundation allows it to significantly outperform JavaScript-based tools. We performed internal benchmarks across our larger repositories, and the results spoke volumes:
| Tooling | Files (~2,500) | Runtime (avg.) |
|---|
| ESLint + Prettier | 2,500 | ~35 seconds |
| Biome | 2,500 | ~5 seconds |
With Biome, we gained near-instantaneous linting and formatting, dramatically improving developer productivity and significantly cutting down CI pipeline execution time. This directly reduced both compute costs and development downtime.
Less Maintenance, More Consistency
Because Biome consolidates formatting and linting, it removes much of the friction around rule compatibility that can arise between separate tools like ESLint and Prettier. For instance, certain ESLint formatting rules often clash with Prettier’s defaults, requiring cumbersome configurations to resolve. With Biome, this conflict disappears altogether, thanks to its thoughtfully designed, unified rule set.
A Smooth Transition: How We Migrated to Biome
Migration was relatively smooth but required careful consideration and planning. Here’s the step-by-step approach we followed:
- Pilot Project & Initial Testing: We picked smaller internal repositories first, running side-by-side comparisons to understand differences in rules and formatting.
- Automatic Migration Tools: Biome provides an automatic configuration migration utility:
biome migrate prettier-eslint- This tool quickly gave us baseline compatibility.
- Addressing Rule Gaps: We reviewed and customized a few Biome rules to fit our specific team standards. While Biome’s defaults were solid, we occasionally needed minor adjustments.
- Incremental Adoption: Team members gradually migrated individual projects, identifying and resolving edge cases along the way.
- CI/CD Integration: Integration into our continuous integration pipelines proved straightforward, dramatically speeding up build and lint steps.
Real-World Benefits Experienced by AckerWorx
Beyond benchmarks, our developers reported several practical advantages:
- Reduced Cognitive Load: Single-tool management simplified development setup.
- Rapid Feedback Loops: Instantaneous formatting and linting provided immediate feedback, reducing context-switching.
- Consistent Codebases: Biome’s clear defaults eliminated bike-shedding over formatting rules and maintained consistency across repositories.
What About Trade-offs?
Biome is relatively new compared to ESLint and Prettier. While it offers significant advantages, teams considering migration should be aware of certain trade-offs:
- Evolving Ecosystem: Unlike ESLint, Biome’s plugin ecosystem is still growing, which can initially limit specialized linting options, especially around frameworks like React or Vue.
- Early-stage Software: Occasional bugs appeared, though we found Biome’s maintainers highly responsive, rapidly fixing issues raised by the community.
Despite these minor trade-offs, the benefits clearly outweighed the negatives in our scenario.
Technical Deep Dive: How Biome Achieves Superior Performance
Biome’s performance advantage stems primarily from:
- Rust’s Speed and Safety: Rust compiles down to highly optimized native code, providing rapid execution.
- Parallelization and Incremental Caching: Biome internally uses parallelism, leveraging multicore processors efficiently, and incremental analysis, which skips redundant processing.
In contrast, ESLint, being a JavaScript-based tool, suffers inherent limitations in performance due to runtime overhead and single-threaded execution.
Considering Biome? Key Tips from Our Experience
If your team is exploring switching from ESLint and Prettier to Biome, here’s what we suggest:
- Start Small: Pilot the migration on smaller projects first to gauge potential issues.
- Leverage Migration Tools: Biome’s built-in configuration migration can save significant manual effort.
- Embrace Defaults Initially: Initially, embrace Biome’s defaults to simplify the transition and only customize when necessary.
- Benchmark Your Projects: Run benchmarks on your specific projects to quantify the performance improvements clearly.
Final Thoughts: Was the Switch to Biome Worth It?
Absolutely. AckerWorx’s development team has experienced tangible improvements in development velocity, reduced maintenance overhead, and greater overall satisfaction since moving to Biome.
Biome isn’t just an incremental improvement—it’s a meaningful leap forward in modernizing our JavaScript and TypeScript tooling.
If you’re interested in learning more, exploring Biome’s features, or considering it for your team, visit the official website:
We’re excited to see how Biome evolves and continues to streamline our coding workflows in the future.
