tsgolint: Lint TypeScript with Microsoft's typescript-go

Overview

tsgolint is an experimental proof of concept for linting JavaScript and TypeScript in Go, powered by Microsoft's typescript-go. It explores whether using TypeScript's Go implementation for parsing and type-checking can make type-aware linting faster, while applying rules directly to the TypeScript AST.

The project is aimed at people exploring linter architecture and performance, rather than teams looking for a production-ready replacement for ESLint. Its maintainers describe it as an experiment, not an indication that typescript-eslint is moving away from ESLint.

Key Features

• Implements 40 type-aware rules from typescript-eslint.
• Provides a basic command-line linter.
• Prototypes a linter engine and a rule-testing tool.
• Includes a source-code fixer.
• Uses typescript-go for parsing and type-checking, and operates directly on the TypeScript AST.
• Runs parsing, type-checking, and linting in parallel across available CPU cores.

Use Cases

• Linter developers can study how a Go implementation might handle type-aware linting.
• TypeScript tooling researchers can explore direct use of the TypeScript AST instead of converting it to ESTree.
• Developers can inspect prototype implementations of typescript-eslint rules and their test infrastructure.
• Teams investigating faster typed linting can use the experiment to inform evaluation of the typescript-eslint discussion about typescript-go.

Getting Started

The repository requires Go 1.24.1 and a typescript-go submodule. From the repository root:

git submodule update --init
cd typescript-go && git am --3way --no-gpg-sign ../patches/*.patch && cd ..
go build -o tsgolint ./cmd/tsgolint

See the README for build details and the repository's benchmarks for its performance tests.

Considerations

The project is explicitly a prototype and is not actively developed. There have been no commits in over a year and no releases in the past year. Most of the code comes from one person, and the available activity data shows no recent issue closures or merged pull requests. Treat the code and its performance claims as experimental, not as a maintained production option.

The main branch does not provide non-type-aware rules, configuration files, a plugin system, editor support, or a rich CLI. JavaScript plugins are unsupported in the main branch; the README describes an experimental compatibility branch whose performance was significantly worse than ESLint running in Node.js. Building also requires initializing and patching the typescript-go submodule before compiling with Go.