Oxlint Alpha Adds ESLint Plugin Support, Delivers 4.8x Speed Advantage

The Oxc project has shipped alpha support for ESLint-compatible JavaScript plugins in Oxlint, pairing a new low-level interoperability mechanism called "raw transfer" with over 650 Rust-native lint rules to close the gap between native speed and ecosystem compatibility. The team's benchmark on Node.js's repository tells the story plainly: Oxlint completed linting in 21 seconds against ESLint's 1 minute 43 seconds, a 4.8x speed advantage, across 6,298 files on a Mac Mini M4 with 48GB RAM running Node.js 24.14.0.

"JavaScript plugins for Oxlint have reached alpha - and we expect 80% of ESLint users can now switch to Oxlint and have it 'just work,'" the Oxc team wrote in the announcement. The plugin system exposes an ESLint-compatible plugin API, meaning existing ESLint plugins can run inside Oxlint without rewriting rules in Rust, while the core Rust rules continue operating at native speed.

The Node.js benchmark run used 104 built-in Oxlint rules written in Rust alongside 75 rules sourced from JS plugins and 23 custom JS rules, totaling 98 JS-layer rules. That rule mix reflects a realistic heavy workload: the Oxc team described Node.js as "a large project utilizing many custom lint rules, as well as several heavy ESLint plugins."

The raw transfer mechanism is central to making that workload tractable. Serializing and deserializing data across the Rust-JS boundary has historically eaten into the speed advantage that Rust-based tooling promises, a friction point that NAPI-RS partially addresses but cannot fully eliminate. Oxc's raw transfer takes a different approach: "Raw transfer reduces the cost of moving data between Rust and JS almost to zero, finally enabling native code and JS plugins to work effectively in tandem." Plugins depending on token APIs, ESLint Stylistic being the named example, are now up to five times faster than they were in the earlier technical preview, a gain attributed to "Rustifying" large sections of the JS plugin infrastructure.

As of January 2026, Oxlint sits at v1.39.0, well past the v1.0 milestone that shipped with over 520 supported ESLint rules, multi-file analysis, and zero-configuration defaults. The current announcement puts the Rust-implemented rule count at over 650. One notable gap remains: type-aware rules are not currently supported, and the Oxc team has flagged that as a consideration for future releases rather than a commitment.

The JS Plugins Alpha is one of four named items on the Oxc Q1 2026 roadmap, alongside Formatter Beta, Minifier Beta, and Transformer Milestone 3. The formatter side of that roadmap already moved in December 2025, when VoidZero announced the Oxfmt alpha, a Rust-based JavaScript and TypeScript formatter claiming 30x speed over Prettier with greater than 95% compatibility, authored by Michael Dong, Dunqing, and Yuji Sugiura.

Oxlint is available as an open-source npm package with migration guides at oxc.rs, and the team says further performance optimizations beyond what raw transfer already delivers are still in the pipeline.