Announcement: Plugins are coming to Biome 2.0

[arendjr]

As the team is preparing for the Biome 2.0 release (no ETA yet, sorry!), I am happy to reveal one of the features that will be a part of that release...

Initial plugin support has been merged: #4396

This builds on top of the GritQL integration that we shipped as part of the 1.9 release, and we've already merged various other performance, compatibility and syntax improvements since then.

At this point, it is important to stress that the exact feature set for plugins in the 2.0 release is not yet fixed. At the very least, users should be able to create GritQL plugins to write custom lint rules for reporting diagnostics in JS/TS files.

We have quite some TODOs still on our wishlist:

• Adding support for (auto-)fixers in plugins
• 📎 Extend plugin support to CSS files #4427
• Improvements to our ☂️ Biome bindings to the GritQL engine #2582. Specifically:
  • Support for querying comments
  • Handling suppressions
  • Better support for querying AST nodes
• Shout-out to @abidjappie and @branberry who have been helping us towards making the ☂️ GritQL Formatter #2476 a reality!

And post-2.0, we'll want to continue looking into plugins that can be written in JS/TS as well.

If you think you can help us out with any of these tasks, please let us know! If not, just be patient and know that good stuff is on the way :) Cheers!

[vorant94]

first on all great work you are doing! I really like biome and it improved my dev experience by a lot compared to its alternatives.

I'm curious about one thing regarding biome plugin system: how is it different to where eslint now stands?

like one of my personal pain points with eslint was that for every small thing i need some 3-rd party plugin with at best 20k npm downloads a month while biome has EVERYTHING out of the box. does biome plugin system means that in a couple of years the same will be true for biome as well?

[arendjr]

in a couple of years the same will be true for biome as well?

We surely hope not!

We very much intent to stick to our batteries-included approach with Biome. Plugins are intended either as workaround for things we haven’t (yet) implemented, or that are too project-specific for us to include in Biome.

Generally, our stance is that if a plugin becomes popular enough that people want to share it, that likely means we'll want to upstream it and create a built-in rule for it. Those are still easier to use for our users, and they're more performant as well.