Biome is what happened when the Rome project got a second life. Rome, the ambitious JavaScript toolchain started by Sebastian McKenzie (creator of Babel and Yarn), aimed to replace ESLint, Prettier, Webpack, and Babel with a single unified tool. When the Rome company shut down in 2023, community maintainers forked the project as Biome and kept building. The result is a Rust-based tool that handles formatting and linting for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX, TSX, JSON, and CSS — and does it an order of magnitude faster than the tools it replaces.
Speed isn’t Biome’s only selling point, though it’s the most measurable one. Formatting a large codebase that takes Prettier several seconds finishes in under 100 milliseconds with Biome. Linting that takes ESLint tens of seconds completes in a fraction of that time. But the real developer experience win is configuration consolidation: one tool, one config file, one binary. No more managing separate configs for ESLint, Prettier, and import sorting plugins or debugging conflicts between them.
Biome’s formatter is intentionally Prettier-compatible, so teams can migrate without reformatting their entire history. The linter includes over 280 rules drawn from ESLint, typescript-eslint, and other popular plugin sets, with clear migration guides. The project is maintained by a group of open-source contributors under the Biome organization, with financial support through Open Collective. With over 15,000 GitHub stars and growing adoption in production codebases, Biome represents the broader trend of JavaScript tooling being rewritten in systems languages — not just for speed, but for the simplicity that comes from removing layers of Node.js dependencies.
