Prettier in Rust; Prettier performance improvements; Node v21.3.0; TC39 meeting November; esbuild...

Prettier challenge – “write a Prettier-compliant pretty printer in Rust”:

• USD 22,500: Pass > 95% of the prettier JavaScript tests.
• USD 2,500: Compile to WASIX [a standardized WebAssembly API] and publish (via CI) to Wasmer [a WebAssembly engine].

Before the challenge, Biome was roughly 85% compatible with Prettier. Several Biome contributors pushed that number to over 96% within three weeks. So far, the second prize hasn’t been claimed. Biome maintainer Emanuele Stoppa: “WASIX requires way more work than expected.”

This is the major new feature of Biome v1.4.0. You can check out the release notes to see what else is new.

“[...] I’ve been contracted by the Prettier team to speed up Prettier’s command line interface (CLI). In this post we’ll take a look at the optimizations I’ve discovered, the process that lead to finding them, some exciting numbers comparing the current CLI with the new one, and some guesses about what could be optimized next.”

“By default times for the same command go from ~29s to ~1.3s, for a ~22x speedup. This requires the cache file to be remembered between executions. We can probably get much closer to a 50x speedup in the future also.”

“If the cache file is not remembered, or if you explicitly turn caching off, or if this is the first run, then times go from ~29s to ~5.5s with parallelization, on my computer, for a ~5x speedup, which should still be pretty significant.”

• Array grouping
• Promise.withResolvers

• Math.sum
• Module sync assert

• Operator overloading
• Extensible numeric literals

• It’s a Node-based runtime for executing JavaScript-based scripts and managing spawning external apps (in those scripts).
• Provides a simplified wrapper around Node’s child_process API.
• Returns promises from calls to spawn.
• Automatically initializes several standard Node modules (chalk, fetch, fs_extra, minimist).
• Automatically escapes and quotes parameters.