Oxlint Now in Beta with 500+ Built-in Rules and 2X Faster JavaScript Linting

Oxlint, a high-performance JavaScript linter developed by the VoidZero team, has entered its beta phase after more than a year of development. This Rust-based linting tool aims to provide significantly faster code analysis compared to traditional JavaScript linters like ESLint, while offering a comprehensive set of built-in rules.

The beta release marks an important milestone for the project, which is now ready for broader adoption in production environments. Oxlint was designed from the ground up to address performance bottlenecks in the JavaScript development workflow, particularly for large codebases where traditional linting can become a significant time sink.

New Beta Cuts Linting Time in Half#

Oxlint's beta release doesn't just incrementally improve on existing linting solutions—it completely transforms the performance landscape. The benchmarks are staggering: Oxlint beta is now twice as fast as its previous release, with impressive performance across major codebases. It processes Microsoft's VSCode repository in just 0.792 seconds (a 2.14x speedup), and Elastic's massive Kibana codebase in only 3.11 seconds (1.94x faster).

These performance gains in this release arrive despite a massive increase in functionality. The beta release now includes 502 total rules, up from 205 in the previous release—a 145% increase in rule coverage. The community-driven project includes code from more than 200 contributors helping shape its direction. The team is actively working on adding more features, including support for custom plugins, which will further extend Oxlint's capabilities.

Part of a Larger JavaScript Tooling Revolution#

This release represents another milestone in the broader effort to transform JavaScript tooling. Oxlint is part of the VoidZero ecosystem, founded by Vue.js creator Evan You in September 2024. The VoidZero team has been methodically rebuilding the JavaScript toolchain from the ground up, focusing on performance, compatibility, and developer experience.

Oxlint specifically addresses one of the most time-consuming aspects of JavaScript development: linting. Traditional linting with ESLint can become a significant bottleneck, especially in large codebases or continuous integration environments. By offering performance that's 50-100x faster than traditional JavaScript linters, Oxlint dramatically shortens feedback cycles and improves developer productivity.

Practical Adoption Path#

Rather than requiring an all-or-nothing migration, the Oxlint team has provided a pragmatic adoption strategy. For smaller projects, Oxlint can completely replace ESLint, while larger, more complex codebases can use the eslint-plugin-oxlint to gradually migrate rules while maintaining compatibility with existing ESLint configurations.

The beta release also brings several features that make adoption easier:

• Configuration via .oxlintrc.json files, supporting nested configurations
• The ability to extend shared configurations
• Support for linting script content in Astro, Svelte, and Vue files without additional setup
• Automatic fixes and suggestions

Beyond Speed: Expanding the Rule Set#

The beta release significantly expands Oxlint's rule coverage, with particular attention to rules from popular ESLint plugins:

• TypeScript-specific rules
• React and React Performance
• Next.js
• Import/export validation
• JSDoc documentation
• Accessibility (jsx-a11y)
• Node.js best practices
• Testing (Jest and Vitest)

This broader coverage makes Oxlint viable for more complex projects and specialized development environments.

What's Next?#

The Oxlint team is already looking ahead to future improvements. Evan You outlined the next steps for the project: supporting custom plugins and improving IDE support. These priorities address two of the most requested features from the community.

Support for existing custom ESLint plugins would enable teams to maintain their specialized linting rules while benefiting from Oxlint's performance advantages. Meanwhile, enhanced IDE and editor integrations will bring improved support for VSCode, Zed, coc.nvim, and IntelliJ, making Oxlint easier to incorporate into developers' daily workflows.

Oxlint's beta release is just one component of the ambitious VoidZero vision to rebuild JavaScript tooling from the ground up. Along with other projects like Rolldown (a bundler) and oxc-parser (a high-performance JavaScript parser), these tools are already being adopted by major companies including OpenAI, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Cloudflare.

For JavaScript developers feeling the pain of slow build and lint cycles, Oxlint beta offers an immediate and dramatic improvement. With this beta release, Oxlint has reached a milestone that makes it suitable for more widespread adoption. The combination of improved performance, expanded rule coverage, and gradual migration options provides developers with a practical path to integrate it into existing workflows, regardless of project size.