February 18, 2026
Fast & Curious: JS Edition
Fastest Front End Tooling for Humans and AI
Speed hype ignites: fans cheer, skeptics want tests, Bun stans crash the thread
TLDR: TypeScript’s Go-powered speed push and new tools promise faster feedback for humans and AI. Comments split between “yes, more speed,” “where’s Bun,” and “this fragments JavaScript,” underscoring a race for performance colliding with worries about real bottlenecks and ecosystem unity.
JavaScript’s newest glow-up is all about speed: TypeScript rewritten in Go for “~10x” faster checks, plus a new formatter (Oxfmt) and linter (Oxlint) promising quick, strict guardrails for humans and AI. The comments? Absolutely sizzling. One camp is fist-bumping the claim that strict settings make AI write cleaner code; as one dev put it, the model actually started anticipating the rules and got tidier on its own. The speed freaks are thrilled.
But the skeptics rolled in fast: “Fastest for whom?” asks one user, arguing the real slowdowns are backend work and testing, not front-end toolchains. Cue the popcorn. Then the Bun brigade kicks open the door: “Where’s Bun?” Some insist Bun is faster and simpler than the suggested setup—instantly turning the thread into a Bun vs Vite/Rolldown grudge match.
And for maximum drama, a doomer chorus warns of a fractured ecosystem—with tools split between Rust and Go—calling it a looming JavaScript “schism.” Meanwhile, a lone voice goes wholesome with “looks more functional, I like it,” quickly drowned out by meme wars about “speedruns for IDEs” and “can your linter bench more than my bundler?” Verdict: thrilling tech, but the community’s split between F1 pit crew energy and “why are we racing on a gravel road?” vibes.
Key Points
- •The article promotes a faster front-end stack built around a Go-based rewrite of TypeScript (“tsgo”), along with Oxfmt (formatter) and Oxlint (linter).
- •The author reports ~10x faster type checking with tsgo, improved stability, and better error detection across 20+ projects.
- •Recommended migration path: use tsdown (libraries) or Vite (web apps), install @typescript/native-preview, replace tsc with tsgo, and enable a VS Code experimental setting.
- •Oxfmt is proposed as a Prettier alternative with built-in plugins (including Tailwind sorting) and fallback to Prettier for other languages; migration involves removing Prettier configs and reformatting.
- •Oxlint can run ESLint plugins via a shim and NAPI-RS, supports TypeScript configs, and offers type-aware linting and type-checking with oxlint-tsgolint powered by tsgo.