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Comment by conaclos | Hacker News Reader

Biome [0], a fast Prettier-compatible formatter, is currently working on adding class sorting [1]. We expect to ship the feature with the next release (on February). We are discussing which options to provide for the feature (mainly on the Discord of Biome).

[0] https://biomejs.dev/ [1] https://github.com/biomejs/biome/pull/1362

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I commend anyone for trying to make the tooling ecosystem better, but I’ve never once thought Prettier was too slow. It runs in a fraction of a second on file save.

The performance comparison on Biomejs’ site shows a Prettier run taking 14 seconds, which I can imagine on a very large code base might be true - but that’s a one-off case surely? Once it’s run, it’s just a case of format on save or commit which is back to near-instantaneous.

What’s the use case I’m missing here?

git commit hooks & ci checks that ensure everything is formatted because that one coworker refuses to set it up to run on save and keeps forgetting causing merge conflicts down the line

We all know that individual…

But still, formatting changed files on commit, even on CI ought to be a fraction of a second.

Typically, you would check the formatting of the entire codebase on the CI or even locally (to ensure that you are doing the same checks on the CI and locally). On a large code base this can take several seconds, reducing developer experience. Yes, you can use git hook to check only changed files. However, this requires more setup and may lead to some misses.

Biome can also format malformed code. It supports formatting as you type.

Biome has less known non-idempotent formatting (For some edge cases you need to run twice Prettier to get a stabilized output).

Biome is also a linter. You get two tools that are closely compatible.

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