Fastest Front End Tooling for Humans and AI

https://cpojer.net/posts/fastest-frontend-tooling

by cpojer • 5 months ago

110 92 5 months ago

EvgheniDem3• 5 months ago

The bit about strict guardrails helping LLMs write better code matches what we have been seeing. We ran the same task in loose vs strict lint configurations and the output quality difference was noticeable.

What was surprising is that it wasn't just about catching errors after generation. The model seemed to anticipate the constraints and generated cleaner code from the start. My working theory is that strict, typed configs give the model a cleaner context to reason from, almost like telling it what good code looks like before it starts.

The piece I still haven't solved: even with perfect guardrails per file, models frequently lose track of cross-file invariants. You can have every individual component lint-clean and still end up with a codebase that silently breaks when components interact. That seems like the next layer of the problem.

takeaura25• 5 months ago

We've been building our frontend with AI assistance and the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to reviewing it. Faster tooling helps, but I wonder if the next big gain is in tighter feedback loops — seeing your changes live as the AI generates them, rather than waiting for a full build cycle.

simonbw• 5 months ago

Are your frontend builds actually so slow that you're not seeing them live? I've gotten used to most frontend builds being single digit seconds or less for what feels like a decade now.

EvgheniDem3• 5 months ago

Exactly this. And what makes it compound is that you can not build muscle memory for patterns you have already reviewed. Same prompt, different output every time, so every generation is a fresh read even if you have seen similar code before.

The feedback loop angle is interesting. Real-time linting during generation rather than after could help catch issues earlier, but I think the deeper problem is the non-determinism. Even with instant feedback, if the output changes on each run you are still starting from scratch each time.

Have you found anything that actually reduces the review time per component, or is it mostly about finding issues faster?

sublinear• 5 months ago

I'm confused by this, but also curious what we mean by "fastest".

In my experience, the bottleneck has always been backend dev and testing.

I was hoping "tooling" meant faster testing, not yet another layer of frontend dev. Frontend dev is pretty fast even when done completely by hand for the last decade or so. I have and have also seen others livecode on 15 minute calls with stakeholders or QA to mock some UI or debug. I've seen people deliver the final results from that meeting just a couple of hours later. I say this as in, that's what's going to prod minus some very specific edge case bugs that might even get argued away and never fixed.

Not trying to be defensive of pure human coding skills, but sometimes I wonder if we've rolled back expectations in the past few years. All this recent stuff seems even more complicated and more error prone, and frontend is already those things.

whstl• 5 months ago

It's about raw performance. The tools mentioned mostly optimize for fast parsing, fast compilation/transpilation, etc.

fsmedberg• 5 months ago

I'm very surprised the article doesn't mention Bun. Bun is significantly faster than Vite & Rolldown, if it's simply speed one is aiming for. More importantly Bun allows for simplicity. Install Bun, you get Bundler included and TypeScript just works, and it's blazing fast.

canadiantim• 5 months ago

Bun can replace vite?

netghost• 5 months ago

Bun ships with lots of tools built in. It has support for bundling js, html, etc for the browser.

I suspect that if you want the best results or to hit all the edge cases you'd still want vite, but bun probably covers most needs.

TheAlexLichter8• 5 months ago

Not really.

yurishimo• 5 months ago

IMO Bun and Vite are best suited for slightly different things. Not to say that there isn't a lot of overlap, but if you don't need many of the features Bun provides, it can be a bit overkill.

Personally, I write a lot of Vue, so using a "first party" environment has a lot of advantages for me. Perhaps if you are a React developer, the swap might be even more straightforward.

I also think it's important to take into consideration the other two packages mentioned in this post (oxlint & oxfmt) because they are first class citizens in Vite (and soon to be Vite+). Bun might be a _technically_ faster dev server, but if your other tools are still slow, that might be a moot point.

Also, Typescript also "just works" in Vite as well. I have a project on work that is using `.ts` files without even an `tsconfig` file in the project.

https://vite.dev/guide/features#typescript

squidsoup2• 5 months ago

Worth mentioning that both oxfmt/oxc are in alpha. I would put money on them replacing prettier and eslint, but they're not ready for production yet.

kevinfiol• 5 months ago

It's been a while since I've tried it, but post-1.0 release of Bun still seemed like beta software and I would get all sorts of hard to understand errors while building a simple CRUD app. My impression from the project is the maintainers were adding so many features that they were spread too thin. Hopefully it's a little more stable now.

dcre5• 5 months ago

Bun and Vite are not really analogous. Bun includes features that overlap with Vite but Vite does a lot more. (It goes without saying that Bun also does things Vite doesn't do because Bun is a whole JS runtime.)

conartist610• 5 months ago

It's funny to me that people should look at this situation and say "this is OK".

The upshot of all these projects to make JS tools faster is a fractured ecosystem. Who if given the choice would honestly want to try to maintain Javascript tools written in a mixture of Rust and Go? Already we've seemingly committed to having a big schism in the middle. And the new tools don't replace the old ones, so to own your tools you'll need to make Rust, Go, and JS all work together using a mix of clean modern technology and shims into horribly legacy technology. We have to maintain everything, old and new, because it's all still critical, engineers have to learn everything, old and new, because it's all still critical.

All I really see is an explosion of complexity.

riskable• 5 months ago

All I really see is an explosion of complexity.

I thought this was the point of all development in the JavaScript/web ecosystem?

CodingJeebus• 5 months ago

We have to maintain everything, old and new, because it's all still critical, engineers have to learn everything, old and new, because it's all still critical.

I completely agree but maintenance is a maintainer problem, not the consumer or user of the package, at least according to the average user of open source nowadays. One of two things are come out of this: either the wheels start falling off once the community can no longer maintain this fractured tooling as you point out, or companies are going to pick up the slack and start stewarding it (likely looking for opportunities to capture tooling and profit along the way).

Neither outcome looks particularly appealing.

NewsaHackO• 5 months ago

Yes, this just sounds like the run-of-the-mill specialization issue that is affecting every industry (and has been affecting every industry before AI). Web devs learn Javascript/Typescript/frameworks, "middleware" developers learn Rust/Go/C++/etc. to build the web development frameworks, lower-level devs build that, etc. There shouldn’t be a strict need for someone who wants to make websites or web technology to learn Rust or Go unless they want to break into web framework development or WASM stuff. But again, this is just over-specialization that has been happening since forever (or at least since the Industrial revolution).

cod1r• 5 months ago

It's definitely an explosion of complexity but also something that AI can help manage. So :shrug: ...

Based on current trends, I don't think people care about knowing how all the parts work (even before these powerful LLMs came along) as long as the job gets done and things get shipped and it mostly works.

dfabulich• 5 months ago

So, what's your counterproposal?

Each of these tools provides real value.

* Bundlers drastically improve runtime performance, but it's tricky to figure out what to bundle where and how.

* Linting tools and type-safety checkers detect bugs before they happen, but they can be arbitrarily complex, and benefit from type annotations. (TypeScript won the type-annotation war in the marketplace against other competing type annotations, including Meta's Flow and Google's Closure Compiler.)

* Code formatters automatically ensure consistent formatting.

* Package installers are really important and a hugely complex problem in a performance-sensitive and security-sensitive area. (Managing dependency conflicts/diamonds, caching, platform-specific builds…)

As long as developers benefit from using bundlers, linters, type checkers, code formatters, and package installers, and as long as it's possible to make these tools faster and/or better, someone's going to try.

And here you are, incredulous that anyone thinks this is OK…? Because we should just … not use these tools? Not make them faster? Not improve their DX? Standardize on one and then staunchly refuse to improve it…?

conartist610• 5 months ago

I'm being a little coy because I do have a very detailed proposal.

In want the JS toolchain to stay written in JS but I want to unify the design and architecture of all those tools you mentioned so that they can all use a common syntax tree format and so can share data, e.g. between the linter and the formatter or the bundler and the type checker.

dcre5• 5 months ago

I look at it and don't really have an issue with it. I have been using tsc, vite, eslint, and prettier for years. I am in the process of switching my projects to tsgo (which will soon be tsc anyway), oxlint, and oxfmt. It's not a big deal and it's well worth the 10x speed increase. It would be nice if there was one toolchain to rule them all, but that is just not the world we live in.

philipwhiuk3• 5 months ago

How do you plan to track CVEs flagged on tsgo's native dependencies.

TheAlexLichter8• 5 months ago

The good part is that the new tools do replace the old ones, while being compatible. The pattern is:

* Rolldown is compatible to Rollup's API and can use most Rollup plugins

* Oxlint supports JS plugins and is ESLint compatibel (can run ESLint rules easily)

* Oxfmt plans to support Prettier plugins, in turn using the power of the ecosystem

* and so on...

So you get better performance and can still work with your favorite plugins and extend tools "as before".

Regarding the "mix of technology" or tooling fatigue: I get that. We have to install a lot of tools, even for a simple application. This is where Vite+[0] will shine, bringing the modern and powerful tools together, making them even easier to adopt and reducing the divide in the ecosystem.

[0] https://viteplus.dev/

lelandfe2• 5 months ago

e: ahhh frick this is just stupid AI spam for this dude’s project.

Supports… some ESLint rules. It is not “easy” to add support to Oxlint for the rules it does not.

The projects at my work that “switched” to it now use both Eslint and Oxlint. It sucks, but at least a subset of errors are caught much faster.

conartist610• 5 months ago

So you really think everyone in JS should have to learn Rust or else be excluded from sharing in the ownership of their critical infra..?

notnullorvoid2• 5 months ago

As far as I'm aware oxlint only supports plugins for non type aware rules, and type aware rules themselves aren't fully stable because it relies on a fork of tsgo.

dejli• 5 months ago

It looks more functional i like it.

gaoshan• 5 months ago

This smells of "I like to solve puzzles and fiddle with things" and reminds of hours spent satisfyingly tweaking my very specific and custom setups for various things technical.

I, too, like to fiddle with optimizations and tool configuration puzzles but I need to get things done and get them done now. It doesn't seem fast, it seems cumbersome and inconsistent.

ssgodderidge• 5 months ago

It doesn't seem fast, it seems cumbersome and inconsistent

I think the point of this project is to provide an opinionated set of templates aimed at shipping instead of tinkering, right? "Don't tinker with the backend frameworks, just use this and focus on building the business logic."

conradkay• 5 months ago

It seems like all you have to do is paste 2-3 prompts

austin-cheney6• 5 months ago

Any method for front end tooling is potentially the fastest. It always comes to what you measure and how you measure it. If you don't have any measures at all then your favorite method is always the fastest no matter what, because you live in a world without evidence.

Even after consideration of measurements radical performance improvements are most typically the result of the code's organization and techniques employed than the language its written in. But, of course, that cannot be validated without evidence from comparison of measurements.

The tragic part of all this is that everybody already knows this, but most front end developers do not measure things and may become hostile when measurements do occur that contradict their favorite techniques.

codingdave• 5 months ago

I have yet to meet a front-end dev that gets hostile when you show them how their code can be improved. On the contrary, the folks I have worked with are thrilled to improve their craft.

Unless of course you are not showing them improvements and are instead just shitting on their work. Yes, people do get hostile to that approach.

austin-cheney6• 5 months ago

Then you and I are talking to different people. Fortunately, I don't work in JavaScript for employment any more. As a frame of reference just the mere mention that a site could be 50-200x faster by dumping React creates conflicts of interests for impacted developers and the results are typically not immediately welcoming. That isn't shitting on anybody's work, especially if you provide guidance for improvement, but if a large group of developers cannot function without React their perception of "shitting on their work" will be less objective.

simonw3• 5 months ago

I take it you've never suggested to a front-end dev that maybe their contact form doesn't need a 1MB+ of JavaScript framework and could just be HTML that submits to a backend.

bingobongodev• 5 months ago

You can omit tsc with : https://oxc.rs/docs/guide/usage/linter/type-aware.html#type-..., so one less script to run in paralell

_pdp_• 5 months ago

This is a good list. Bookmarked.

sunaookami• 5 months ago

Oxfmt!? I just switched from ESLint and Prettier to Biome!

nimonian• 5 months ago

I really liked biome but it kept murdering my .vue files

h4ch1• 5 months ago

dprint ftw, works very well with Svelte as far as I've seen.

Biome and oxc* never worked properly with Svelte, but I haven't tried them since the past 9 or so months when I switched to dprint from prettier.

sibeliuss• 5 months ago

Biome missed the bus by not getting mixed language formatting in soon enough. Oxfmt got it, and then won.

kevlened• 5 months ago

Oxfmt got it, and then won.

This doesn't align with the data.

  - 650k npm downloads for oxfmt this week [0]
  - 4.3m npm downloads for biome this week [1]

  - 19.1k gh stars for oxfmt [2]
  - 23.7k gh stars for biome [3]
  - gap widening in favor of biome [4]

  [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/oxfmt
  [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@biomejs/biome
  [2] https://github.com/oxc-project/oxc
  [3] https://github.com/biomejs/biome
  [4] https://www.star-history.com/#oxc-project/oxc&biomejs/biome&type=date&legend=top-left

insin• 5 months ago

Any plans to create a combined server + web app template using @hono/vite-dev-server for local development, with both sides of auth preconfigured, with the server serving up the built web app in production?

I've used this setup for my last few projects and it's so painless, and with recent versions of Node.js which can strip TypeScript types I don't even need a build step for the server code.

Edit: oops, I didn't see nkzw-tech/fate-template, which has something like this, but running client and server separately instead

vivzkestrel3• 5 months ago

get rid of both Oxfmt and Oxlint and use biome OP

elxr• 5 months ago

For what reason?

vivzkestrel3• 5 months ago

because it is a single tool that does lint, formatting and checking sort order. you really dont need 3 libraries in its place

loevborg• 5 months ago

what are the pros and cons of oxlint vs biome?

vivzkestrel3• 5 months ago

biome does the work of all 3 of those libraries for starters

Exoristos• 5 months ago

All y'all need more RAM in your development laptops. Maybe. At least, I've never been bothered by the performance of standard tooling like prettier, ESLint, and npm.

squidsoup2• 5 months ago

On a large codebase, eslint is quite slow.

agos2• 5 months ago

ESLint on medium/big projects can be pretty slow and if you use type aware rules it opts out of caching

e10jc• 5 months ago

Very cool list but why no mention of biome? I’ve been using that on a recent project and it’s been pretty great. Also bun test instead of vitest.

huksley• 5 months ago

One nitpick is Claude Code on the web does not do linting by default, so you need to run lint for its changes manually.

fullstackchris• 5 months ago

anyone have any insight as to why microsoft chose go? I feel like with rust it could have been even faster!

steveklabnik• 5 months ago

They said at the time that Go let them keep the overall structure of the code, that is, they weren't trying to do a re-implementation from scratch, more of a port, and so the port was more straightforward with Go.

Narretz• 5 months ago

Kinda crazy that ts-node is still the recommendation when it hasn't been updated since 2023. And likewise crazy that no other lib has emerged that has typescript compilation and typechecking. Of course if it works, don't fix it, but typescript has evolved quite a bit since 2023.

dcre5• 5 months ago

I like tsx for this, and it's actively maintained. The author may not know about it. https://github.com/privatenumber/tsx

TheAlexLichter8• 5 months ago

Love that fact that you don't need anything ts-node/tsx like if you have erasable syntax only. Other than that, there is https://github.com/oxc-project/oxc-node too.

philipwhiuk3• 5 months ago

Can't wait for the first crypto-attack on a front-end JS library that's caused by a Go package vuln. God knows how `pnpm audit` will handle Go-module dependencies.

(I opened an issue against typescript-go to flag this https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/issues/2825 )

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