Announcing Oxlint Type-Aware Linting

For more technical details, implementations, and considerations for Oxlint's type-aware linting, see the blog post on the Oxc website.

TL;DR: Oxlint with type-aware linting is now available and supports 40 long-awaited rules including no-floating-promises. Oxlint uses tsgolint, which @auvred initially prototyped as typescript-eslint/tsgolint and generously offered to continue its development under the Oxc organization.

The VoidZero team is excited to announce that oxlint has taken a big step towards being a full-fledged Rust-based linting replacement with type-aware linting. This release unlocks 40 long-awaited rules including no-floating-promises.

Unlocking type-aware linting ​

Type-aware linting has been one of the biggest feature gaps for native linters like oxlint. Traditional lint rules only review one file at a time, which is fast and parallelizable. However, type-aware lint rules call TypeScript’s types API to infer types, which may require reviewing every file. As a result, type-aware lint rules are more capable than traditional lint rules, but slower.

oxlint’s first approach to solving type-aware linting’s slow performance was implementing its own type-checker. After multiple attempts, this approach was abandoned because maintaining a type-checker on par with a fast-moving target like TypeScript is not feasible.

Other approaches, like TypeScript inter-process communication, were also considered and abandoned. The key to unlocking type-aware lint rules turned out to be TypeScripts native Go port and tsgolint.

Building on tsgolint ​

The tsgolint project is an experimental type-aware linter written in Go and initially prototyped by @auvred as typescript-eslint/tsgolint. However, the typescript-eslint team decided not to allocate development resources to this prototype, as they plan to continue their work on typescript-eslint for typed linting with ESLint.

The VoidZero team contacted @auvred for a forked, scoped-down version adapted for oxlint. In a true “standing on the shoulder of giants” moment, @auvred generously offered to continue its development under oxc-project/tsgolint.

Performance ​

Initial oxlint with type-aware linting tests show repositories that previously took 1 minute to run with typescript-eslint now finish in <10 seconds.

Using projects from oxlint-ecosystem-ci:

Next steps ​

The VoidZero team will continue to develop and improve upon tsgolint. For v1.0 release, we will:

• Address performance issue for large monorepos
• Add the ability to configure individual rules
• Further validate correctness of each individual rules
• Add IDE support
• Ensure overall stability

Acknowledgements ​

The VoidZero team would like to extend our gratitude to:

• The TypeScript team for creating typescript-go.
• The typescript-eslint team for their heartwarming support.
• @auvred for creating tsgolint.
• @camchenry for the oxlint + tsgolint integration.
• @camc314 for work on performance issues.

Join the community ​

The VoidZero team would love to hear your feedback on oxlint and type-aware linting, and are excited to see how it helps improve your development workflow.

Connect with us:

• Discord: Join our community server for real-time discussions
• GitHub: Share feedback on GitHub Discussions
• Issues: Report oxlint bugs to oxc and type-aware linting bugs to tsgolint.