Rust Js Tooling 2025: Why Biome, Oxc, And Rolldown Change Everything

Posted on Dec 31

• Originally published at dataformathub.com

The JavaScript tooling landscape is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the practical advantages of Rust. As of late 2025, we're seeing these Rust-based tools mature, offering tangible performance gains and a more robust development experience. Having spent considerable time putting Biome.js, Oxc, and Rolldown through their paces on complex projects, I can tell you that the shift isn't just hype; it's a sturdy evolution of our core development infrastructure, much like how Modern CLI Deep Dive: Why Rust and GPU Terminals Change Everything in 2025 explores the terminal space.

Rust's appeal in this domain is straightforward: its focus on memory safety, zero-cost abstractions, and robust concurrency models directly translates to faster, more reliable tools. Where JavaScript-based tools often hit performance ceilings due to the overhead of the runtime and garbage collection, Rust-compiled binaries execute at near-native speeds. This is particularly critical for CPU-bound tasks like parsing, linting, formatting, and bundling, which are ubiquitous in modern frontend workflows.

Let me walk you through the recent developments and how these tools are practically reshaping our daily routines, from local development to CI/CD pipelines.

Biome.js has always aimed to be the all-in-one frontend toolchain, consolidating formatting, linting, and import organization. With the beta release of version 2.0 in March 2025 and its subsequent stabilization around June 2025, it has solidified its position as a compelling alternative to fragmented JavaScript-based setups like ESLint and Prettier.

The core architectural advantage of Biome lies in its unified approach. Instead of multiple tools parsing your code independently, Biome parses code just once, constructs a single Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), and then reuses that AST for all subsequent operations—linting, formatting, and import sorting. This "one-parse, multiple-passes" strategy eliminates massive computational overhead, which is why it consistently delivers impressive speedups.

One of the most significant advancements in Biome 2.0 is the introduction of a plugin system, allowing developers to write custom lint rules using GritQL. This addresses a long-standing request from the community, extending Biome's capabilities beyond its built-in rule set. Furthermore, type-aware rules, such as noFloatingPromises, have been im

Source: Dev.to