Oxlint emerges from the OXC project, an ambitious effort to rebuild the JavaScript toolchain in Rust for maximum performance. Where ESLint's architecture processes code through a plugin pipeline that loads JavaScript-based rules one at a time, Oxlint implements all lint rules natively in Rust and evaluates them in a single pass over the AST. This architectural difference eliminates the overhead of Node.js startup, plugin loading, and repeated tree traversal, resulting in lint times measured in milliseconds rather than seconds even on large monorepos. The practical impact is that developers can run linting on every keystroke without perceptible delay, and CI pipelines complete lint checks in a fraction of the time.
The rule set covers over 520 checks drawn from popular ESLint plugins including eslint-plugin-react, eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y, eslint-plugin-typescript, eslint-plugin-import, eslint-plugin-jest, and eslint-plugin-unicorn. Rules are categorized into correctness, suspicious, pedantic, performance, and style groups with sensible severity defaults. Oxlint requires zero configuration to start — running npx oxlint on any JavaScript or TypeScript project immediately catches bugs and anti-patterns. For teams migrating from ESLint, the recommended approach is running both tools in parallel and progressively disabling ESLint rules that Oxlint already covers, reducing overall lint time while maintaining coverage.
OXC is positioned as the foundation for next-generation JavaScript tooling under Evan You's VoidZero initiative, which also includes the Rolldown bundler and the Vite build tool. The project's scope extends beyond linting to include a full parser, transformer, minifier, and formatter, all sharing the same high-performance Rust AST infrastructure. Major projects including Microsoft's VS Code, Elastic's Kibana, and Shopify's codebase have adopted Oxlint for its speed advantages. With over 20,000 GitHub stars on the OXC repository and active development through 2026, Oxlint represents the leading edge of the Rust-rewrite movement in JavaScript tooling.
