Your Code Checks Now Take Under a Second

A new tool called Oxlint checks large codebases up to 100 times faster than the old standard — and that speed has real business implications.

Something quiet happened in developer tooling

Every time a developer on your team saves a file or pushes code to the server, a small program runs in the background to check for mistakes. Think of it like a spell-checker, but for code. The most common one — ESLint — has been around for over a decade. It works, but it's slow. On a large project, it can take 30 to 60 seconds every single time.

That might not sound like much. But when it happens dozens of times a day, across a whole team, it adds up. It slows down the rhythm of work. It costs money when you're paying for automated checks to run in the cloud.

A tool called Oxlint — part of a wider project named OXC — now does the same job in under a second. Not 10% faster. We're talking about finishing before a developer can even look up from their keyboard.

What makes this possible is that Oxlint is written in a programming language called Rust, which is built for raw speed. The old tools were written in JavaScript — perfectly fine, but not built with performance as the top priority.

As of early 2026, Oxlint is considered production-ready, meaning teams can rely on it for real work, not just experiments.

What this means if you're paying for a dev team

Faster feedback loops make developers happier and more productive. Smaller cloud bills from automated checks. Less friction between writing code and shipping it.

Words worth knowing

Linter — A program that automatically reads code and flags potential mistakes or style issues, the way a grammar checker works in Word.

CI (Continuous Integration) — A process where every code change automatically triggers a set of checks before it goes live. Like a quality gate that runs without anyone pressing a button.

Monorepo — When a company keeps all of its code in one single project folder, rather than splitting it into many separate ones. Common at mid-size tech companies.

Rust — A programming language known for being very fast and memory-efficient. Several modern developer tools are being rewritten in it for exactly that reason.

If your dev team is still on the old setup, it's worth asking them whether Oxlint might fit in. The switch can be gradual — no need to throw everything out at once.