February 22, 2026
Fast, furious, and auto‑formatted
The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler
Rust-powered JS tool promises speed, sparks chaos and heartbreak in the comments
TLDR: A new Rust-based JavaScript toolkit promises much faster, cleaner development tools, thrilling some developers who are already using it in real projects. But one formatter’s aggressive auto-formatting triggered horror stories, sparking a wider debate about safety, monetization, and why developer tools are lightning-fast while many websites still feel slow.
A new Rust-powered toolkit called Oxc just dropped, promising to make JavaScript tools insanely fast — think “your old tools were on dial‑up” fast. It bundles a linter (a bug catcher), formatter (a code beautifier), and more, all claiming wild speed boosts over the big names developers use today. One user, owickstrom, is already in the honeymoon phase, calling it “awesome” and raving that it lets them ship a single clean program instead of a messy pile of tools. For them, these are “good times for web tech.”
But every love story needs heartbreak, and that’s where oxfmt, the new formatter, crashes the party. Commenter Grom_PE ran it once and watched in horror as it silently marched through their folders and reformatted everything, destroying their carefully styled files with no undo. Their warning reads like a tech horror story: one command, and years of hand-crafted code style, gone. Others step back to ask the big questions: how will the creators make money, and why are developers obsessed with making their tools fast while still shipping slow websites to users? The thread turns into a mix of admiration, panic, and philosophy: is this the future of web tooling, or just another fast car with no seatbelts?
Key Points
- •Oxc is an open-source collection of high-performance JavaScript tools written in Rust, including a linter, formatter, parser, transformer, resolver, and minifier.
- •Oxlint is an ESLint-compatible linter claiming 50–100x faster performance than ESLint, with 650+ rules, type-aware linting via tsgo, and support for ESLint JS plugins.
- •Oxfmt is an alpha, Prettier-compatible formatter that is claimed to be 3x faster than Biome and 35x faster than Prettier, with Tailwind class sorting support.
- •oxc-parser, forming the basis for transformations, is reported to be 3x faster than SWC, supports .js(x)/.ts(x), and passes all Test262 stage 4 tests, with benchmarks on a MacBook Pro M3 Max.
- •Additional tools—oxc-transform, oxc-resolver, and oxc-minify—provide fast transpilation, Node.js-compatible module resolution, and code minification; the project is funded by multiple sponsors and backers.