I know that "Rome wasn't built in a day" is part of the joke, but this project feels stuck in development hell.

Since starting the project they have gotten a new competitor, which is Deno. They are much of the same and are also using Rust.

https://deno.land/manual@v1.18.2/tools

It really seems that way, but finding good foundations/abstractions is crucial if you are building such megalomaniac project that should cover all JS/TS tooling. It seems they feel pretty good with what they found (Rust & some form of CST) and they will drop formatter soon. We'll see if these foundations will last at least 1000 years.

They even lost one of their founders, which doesn't bode super well.

seriously -- their development churn makes yarn and npm development look hypersonic.

> But why create a new formatter? When we began our Rust rewrite, we fell in love with rustfmt, Rust’s own formatter. It formatted code instantly, unlike JavaScript formatters which could often take quite a few seconds on larger files.

I write quite a bit of Rust and quite a bit of TypeScript and use both rustfmt and prettier. I really like both tools, but don’t think rustfmt is much faster honestly. I would probably say prettier in VSCode feels a bit more responsive.

If it's speed you are looking for, give dprint (https://github.com/dprint/dprint) a try, it has a vscode plugin too.

Why not dprint[1]? Does it not "produce a concrete syntax tree (CST) that represents the original code completely, whitespace, comments and all"?

I'm not terribly familiar with the architecture of dprint, but it's used in Deno with JS/TS plugin and works great so far.

[1] https://github.com/dprint/dprint

I hardly understand the purpose of it. Never had any issue with prettier speed.

The compilation speed is already solved by eslint.

Looks like they are creating a unified alternative of prettier,eslint, webpack?. If so why not just fork all these and build on top of that.

Sounds like the announcement of an announcement is being written in Rust then.

this project will either be very successful or end really fast. I don't see any other option