If you were hanging out in the web development scene circa 2021, you probably remember the absolute frenzy surrounding Rome. It wasn't just another linter or formatter; it was heralded as the unified savior of the fractured JavaScript ecosystem. Created by Sebastian McKenzie (the mastermind behind Babel and Yarn), Rome promised to replace Babel, ESLint, webpack, Prettier, and Jest with a single, blazing-fast, cohesive toolchain written in Rust.
Fast forward to today, and the headline floating around the developer community is grim but profoundly true: Rome fell, and nobody noticed.
The project went quiet, the company behind it spun down, the NPM packages were deprecated, and the repository was archived. Yet, the modern web development machine kept right on chugging. Why did this highly anticipated monolithic toolchain collapse? How did the community route around it without missing a beat? And most importantly, what does Rome's silent demise teach us about the economics of open-source software, the danger of "second-system syndrome," and the tools we use today? Let’s dive in.
The Grand Promise of Rome
To understand why Rome's fall is so fascinating, we have to look at the problem it was trying to solve. The JavaScript tooling landscape is notoriously fragmented. To kickstart a modern TypeScript project, your configuration boilerplate often looks like this:
package.jsonto manage dependenciestsconfig.jsonto configure the TypeScript compiler.eslintrc.jsonto lint your code.prettierrcto format your codejest.config.tsorvitest.config.tsfor testingwebpack.config.jsorvite.config.tsto bundle it all together
Each of these tools parses your source code into its own Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), processes it, and throws it away. This redundant parsing is incredibly CPU-intensive. If you have a codebase with one million lines of code, running your linter, formatter, and bundler sequentially means parsing those million lines of code three or four separate times.
Rome’s thesis was beautiful in its simplicity: One AST to rule them all.
By building a single, unified compiler, linter, formatter, bundler, and test runner under one roof, Rome only needed to parse your files once. The performance gains were projected to be order-of-magnitude improvements, especially when rewritten from TypeScript into Rust.
The Downfall: Second-System Syndrome and Funding Woes
So, what went wrong? Rome suffered from a classic case of Second-System Syndrome—the tendency of engineers to follow a small, elegant, successful system with an over-engineered, feature-bloated second system.
Rome originally began as a JavaScript project. But midway through its development, the team decided to rewrite the entire codebase in Rust to chase maximum performance. While Rust was undoubtedly the right choice for speed, rewriting a massive, uncompleted toolchain from scratch severely delayed their time-to-market.
At the same time, Rome was backed by venture capital. Rome Tools Inc. raised $4.5 million in 2021. But VC money comes with intense pressure for rapid growth and monetization strategies. For an open-source developer tool that hadn't even shipped its core features yet, this pressure proved fatal. When the runway ran out, the company laid off its staff, and the original vision of Rome evaporated.
The Empire Reborn: Enter Biome
But this isn't just a story of failure. The beautiful thing about open source is that good ideas rarely die; they just mutate. When Rome's corporate structure collapsed, the community did what the community does best: they forked it.
Today, Rome lives on under a new name: Biome.
Biome is the spiritual and literal successor to Rome. It focuses heavily on being an ultra-fast formatter and linter for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX, and JSON. And unlike its predecessor, Biome is thriving. It won a massive open-source award from Prettier for compatibility, and it is incredibly fast. Let’s look at how you can use it today to replace ESLint and Prettier in your stack.
Migrating to Biome: A Practical Example
If you want to experience what Rome was actually trying to achieve, you can set up Biome in about thirty seconds. It is a single binary with zero dependencies.
First, install Biome via your favorite package manager:
npm install --save-dev --save-exact @biomejs/biomeNext, initialize your configuration file:
npx @biomejs/biome initThis will generate a clean, minimal biome.json file in your root directory. Here is an example of what it looks like:
{
"$schema": "https://biomejs.dev/schemas/1.8.3/schema.json",
"organizeImports": {
"enabled": true
},
"linter": {
"enabled": true,
"rules": {
"recommended": true,
"style": {
"useConst": "error"
}
}
},
"formatter": {
"enabled": true,
"formatWithErrors": false,
"indentStyle": "space",
"indentWidth": 2,
"lineWidth": 80
}
}To run the linter and formatter simultaneously on your project, you run a single, unified command:
npx @biomejs/biome check --write ./srcBecause Biome is written in Rust and uses a unified AST, running biome check is often 10x to 100x faster than running ESLint and Prettier sequentially. In large codebases, this reduces pre-commit hook times from 15 seconds down to milliseconds.
Why Didn't Anyone Notice Rome's Fall?
If Rome was so revolutionary, why did its death happen with a whimper rather than a bang? There are three main reasons:
1. The Rise of "Good Enough" Competitors
While Rome was busy rewriting itself in Rust and burning through VC funding, other tools stepped up to solve developer pain points incrementally. Vite solved the bundling and local dev server speed problems. esbuild and SWC solved the fast compilation problems. Developers didn't need to wait for Rome's all-in-one holy grail because they could cobble together an incredibly fast toolchain using Vite, SWC, and Prettier today.
2. The Micro-Utility Philosophy Wins
Unix philosophy states that a tool should do one thing and do it well. Rome challenged this by trying to do *everything*. While the unified AST approach makes sense on paper, it creates a massive engineering bottleneck. If you want to update your linter rules, you shouldn't have to worry about breaking your test runner. The JS community ultimately preferred modular, swappable components over a monolithic sandbox.
3. The Seamless Transition to Biome
When Rome officially went under, the core maintainers and community contributors didn't let the code gather dust. They smoothly transitioned the community to Biome. Because Biome maintained backwards compatibility with Rome's configuration, those who *were* using Rome simply swapped their packages and kept running.
Lessons for Developers and Maintainers
The rise, fall, and resurrection of Rome offer invaluable lessons for software engineers and architects:
- Venture Capital in DevTools is a Double-Edged Sword: VC funding can accelerate development, but it also forces project maintainers to focus on monetization and hyper-growth rather than community building and stability.
- Scope Creep Kills: If your project aims to replace ESLint, Prettier, Babel, webpack, and Jest all at once, you are fighting a war on five fronts. Focus on doing one thing exceptionally well before expanding your scope.
- Bet on Open Protocols, Not Monolithic Proprietary Visions: The success of Biome proves that open-source software is resilient. The company behind Rome failed, but the open-source code survived because it belonged to the community.
Conclusion
Rome fell, and nobody noticed because the Web Dev empire was already rebuilding itself. The dream of a unified, lightning-fast Rust toolchain didn't die with Rome; it simply shed its corporate weight, rebranded as Biome, and became the community-driven tool we actually wanted all along.
If you are still waiting for your ESLint and Prettier tasks to finish running in your CI/CD pipelines, it might be time to let go of the past. Give Biome a spin on your next project—you might be shocked at just how fast your developer loop can be.
Have you migrated any projects to Biome yet? Or are you sticking with the tried-and-true ESLint/Prettier setup? Let’s talk about it in the comments below!