Rome was an ambitious JavaScript toolchain project created by Sebastian McKenzie, the original creator of Babel, that aimed to unify linting, formatting, bundling, testing, and compilation into a single tool, replacing the fragmented ecosystem of ESLint, Prettier, webpack, Jest, and Babel with one cohesive solution. Introduced in August 2020 as the spiritual successor to Babel, Rome formed a company and raised $4.5 million in venture capital in May 2021 to pursue its vision of a unified developer toolchain. The project was rewritten in Rust for performance and began shipping a linter and formatter that were orders of magnitude faster than their JavaScript-based counterparts.
Rome was notable for its technical ambition and performance achievements, demonstrating that Rust-based JavaScript tooling could dramatically outperform the established tools. The Rome formatter could process code hundreds of times faster than Prettier, and its linter provided more detailed diagnostics than ESLint with zero configuration required. The project aimed to eliminate the complexity of configuring multiple interdependent tools with their own configuration files, plugin systems, and version compatibility requirements, replacing everything with a single binary that handled the entire development workflow.
Rome's development stalled due to organizational challenges, with the core team losing access to administrative systems and npm registries, and multiple attempts to reach the project owner proving unsuccessful. In August 2023, the core team members who had been maintaining Rome announced Biome as the official fork, combining "Bis" and "Rome" to create the new name. The rome npm package is no longer maintained, and the community has fully transitioned to Biome, which continues Rome's legacy of fast, unified JavaScript tooling with active development and growing adoption as a replacement for ESLint and Prettier.
