April 3, 2025

It has been a while since we posted one of our monthly showcases. This is mostly because the community has been hard at work on some exciting but rather large projects!

Today, we're going to give some updates on those and share what we've been up to. We'll also be switching these posts to be quarterly since much of the work is longer running, but we'll still be posting about other things in between! ❤️

e18e CLI / web report

One of the pain points in adopting recommendations from the e18e community has been the fact that it mostly involves manual work and joining the dots between various tools.

For example, just some of the great tools we use today:

• arethetypeswrong - analyzes your package for TypeScript publishing/configuration problems
• publint - verifies that you publish your package correctly
• node-modules.dev - analyzes your dependency tree and various other aspects
• eslint-plugin-depend - analyzes your dependencies for replaceable/redundant packages

These tools are often combined with various manual processes and scripts to do the investigation work of what we can improve in a package.

This makes it very difficult for maintainers to check their own packages for possible improvements. We want to solve this and provide good enough tooling that you can do it yourself, with ease.

That is why we are now working on an e18e CLI and somewhere we can produce reports for packages on the web. Our vision is that you can throw your package name or package.json into this tool and see all of the recommended changes, warnings, etc.

This is very early stage right now and being worked on by antfu, blu and 43081j, but will be coming very soon! 🙌

Prettier CLI

For the last couple of months, we have been hard at work on the new prettier CLI. The idea is that this will eventually replace the current one, but initially be available behind a flag.

But why do we need a new one? Well, a little bit of backstory...

Some time ago, we were digging through CPU profiles of prettier, trying to figure out why it was particularly slow in some larger projects. It turns out, much of the slowness comes from things we often don't need.

For example, prettier currently allows you to override the config at any level, but we don't actually see much use of that in the wild. However, just in case you do use that, the CLI has to check every directory for each supported format of prettierrc. This is very expensive when you know you don't have any.

We raised this in the e18e discord, and found that Fabio already started work on a new CLI a few years ago to solve this and many other performance issues!

The project had gone a little stale since he hadn't worked on it for some time, but we kicked off a new piece of work to get the ball rolling again.

Initial tests with this have often shown a 10x speed up on formatting a large repo 🎉

There's still work to do, but keep an eye out for another announcement once we're ready to start trials!

ESLint performance

We recently started discussions around the performance of ESLint. As usual with a pluggable tool, many of the performance issues come from plugins rather than ESLint itself. So, we started work on various plugins to improve their performance.

It is also worth noting that, while there are extremely fast alternatives to ESLint these days, many of us can't switch over or don't want to (e.g. if we rely on plugins that haven't been ported over). That is why it is still important we improve what we can in the ESLint ecosystem.

Just a few wins we've seen so far:

• eslint-plugin-import-x moves to a rust-based resolver
  • Big thanks to JounQin and sukka for the various improvements on this and other ESLint plugins they maintain
• eslint-plugin-n had an almost 20x perf improvement on one of their rules
  • Thanks to pralkarz for this one
• eslint-plugin-svelte dropped a bunch of compat code for older versions of ESLint

typescript-eslint vitest migration

A while ago, we started a conversation around migrating the TSESLint repo from jest to vitest.

The idea was that this would greatly improve test run performance, modernise some of the tests themselves and lighten the install size for maintainers.

Around the same time, we discovered Arya had already been working on this for a few months in some unfinished branches. From there, we decided to lend a helping hand in reviews and such to help get this over the line.

Arya has done a huge amount of work moving every sub-package of the repo to vitest one by one, and we're now at the stage where many of them are near enough ready to merge.

This is a great example of where it will not affect the end user directly, but will speed up CI and maintainer workflows significantly.

If you want to follow the work, keep an eye on the tracking issue.

Stream cleanup

Streams are very useful for dealing with large amounts of data in a performant way. You'll find them in use in most of the tools we use today, especially those which deal with reading large files, network resources, etc.

Over the years, many packages have been published to provide utilities for dealing with these. For example, utilities to create pipelines, buffer windows, concatenation and much more

These have all been of great use, but many have since been made redundant by Node itself shipping similar functionality in the stream module.

For example, you can now use the built-in pipeline function for transforming a stream through a pipeline of transforms:

pipeline(source, transform1, transform2, (err) => {
  if (err) {
    // error thrown
  }
  else {
    // pipeline finished successfully
  }
})

In an effort to clean up these redundant usages, and use the built-in standard library, the community has been contributing to many different projects and removing them.

Just a few packages which have seen improvements:

• metro dropped through2 (PR)
• postcss-cli dropped get-stdin and more (PR)
• exegesis dropped pump (PR)

Huge thanks to v1rtl for leading this effort!

Collaborations

This year, we've taken more of a focus on collaborating with organisations involved in open source. Our community can't do all of this work alone, so helping organisations do some of this themselves will go a long way and ultimately impact the user a lot more in many cases.

Here's just a few of the projects and organisations we've been collaborating with:

• Netlify (tracking issue)
• 11ty (tracking issue)
• nx (tracking issue)
• changesets

We're also continuing to collaborate with storybook, vite, svelte, and many other projects.

Events

This year, we're putting more effort into attending conferences and meet ups. This has given us some great opportunities to meet people from the community in person, and to introduce more people to it 🎉

At some point we will also be looking to do talks at events like this, so keep an eye out!

Amsterdam meetup

As part of this, we also had our first ever meetup 🥳 Taking place in Amsterdam, we had a great turnout and a lot of productive discussions.

Big thanks to the people who managed to make it ❤️ There will be more of these in future, so come along if you're able to and meet some of the community.

Svelte Summit

Svelte summit is this May! Both patak and 43081j will be around, so if you'll be there, come say hi!

We've collaborated a lot with the svelte community in the past, so this will be an exciting opportunity to meet some familiar faces in person and talk about where we can help in future.

ViteConf 25

ViteConf 25 was recently announced and will be taking place in Amsterdam this October.

Quite a few of the e18e community will be attending. If you'll be there too, let us know, as we'd love to catch up 🙏

Get involved

If you'd like to help out, or you're a maintainer and want to collaborate more closely, join our discord and say Hi!