Rome Tools

» see rome.tools as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Sebastian McKenzie wrote Babel as a teenager in Australia and then worked on Yarn at Facebook. Very few people reach a third project with that much credit already banked. He opened the rome/tools repository on 20 February 2020 and introduced it publicly that August as the spiritual successor to Babel. The pitch was a single binary that would do the job of Babel, ESLint, webpack, Prettier and Jest, with one config file and one dependency, because the JavaScript toolchain had become a stack of separate programs that each needed to be told the same things about your project in a different syntax.

In May 2021 the project became Rome Tools, Inc. with $4.5 million behind it. Everyone could see the business question hanging over it. An open-source developer tool has to turn into revenue somehow, and the answer never arrived in public. What arrived instead was a technical decision: in September 2021 the team announced that the TypeScript implementation was being thrown away and the whole thing rewritten in Rust. Three months after that, co-founder Jamie Kyle left.

Nothing I build has a node_modules directory in it, and my own toolchain arguments are about CUDA versions and a Python resolver that needs four minutes to pick a numpy. The twenty-open-tabs config problem Rome existed to kill was somebody else's twenty tabs. The bargain underneath it travels anywhere, because every language offers the same one eventually: hand one vendor your formatter and your linter, and accept that if the vendor stops, both of them stop on the same morning.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rust rewrite ~

Fourteen months is a long time to spend rewriting a product that has users and investors. Rome v10 landed in November 2022 and it was good: a linter fast enough to change how often you ran it, and a formatter deliberately built to match Prettier's output, so that adopting it did not reformat your entire repository on the first commit. Matching the incumbent byte for byte was expensive engineering done purely to lower the cost of switching.

It was also the last release that mattered. McKenzie did not post about Rome again. Within a few months every employee of Rome Tools, Inc. had been laid off, and the company stopped being a company without an announcement and without a date anyone outside could write down.

~ the keys nobody had ~

Emanuele Stoppa kept the project alive on his own time while working at Astro, and discovered what maintaining a dead company's open-source project actually means. He had some publishing rights and almost nothing else. In his own words he did not have admin rights on the Discord, so he could not even delegate moderation to anyone, and he had no access to the npm or VS Code registries the releases had to go through. The website's hosting account belonged to somebody who was not answering.

~ 29 august 2023 ~

On 29 August 2023 Stoppa and the remaining core team published Announcing Biome, calling it the official fork of Rome. The post is unusually plain about why. Repeated attempts to reach the owner had gone unanswered. The Rome name was attached to GitHub organizations and domains registered to McKenzie personally, and nobody knew whether it was trademarked, so continuing to use it risked legal trouble they had no budget for.

This was not a disagreement about technical direction. It was a group of maintainers locked out of their own release infrastructure, rebuilding the accounts from scratch under a name they were certain they owned. Three days later, on 1 September at 17:22 UTC, the @rometools account posted that the project was officially discontinued and the repository archived. The final commit landed on 4 September.

~ 23,363 stars ~

The domain did not survive the handover. The archive's last capture of rome.tools is 1 October 2023 and the hostname has since been dropped, so the documentation the README points at is gone while the README is not. The repository itself still sits there read-only, Rust source complete and issue tracker frozen, with 23,363 stars and 641 forks on it. The biomejs/biome repository was opened on 27 July 2023, five weeks before the archiving, and it holds close to 26,000 stars today.

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