dprint (discussed yesterday) is a fast auto-formatting tool. It’s interesting to me because:

• When I say it is fast, I mean it is really fast. Much, much faster than (e.g.) Prettier. A big part of that speed is that it is written in Rust (shocking!) and takes advantage of that. This is part of why DefinitelyTyped could adopt it!

• It works with the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem — no surprise, since it came out of work at Deno. It also works with other ecosystems and formats, though. There are formatter plugins for Markdown, TOML, YAML, CSS, HTML (and Vue and Svelte and Astro as a result), and handles embedded languages (code blocks in Markdown, script or style blocks in HTML, etc.).

• As with other similar tools in the space, it both lets you format code (dprint fmt) and check whether code matches its configured formatting rules (dprint check), so you can use it as a “lint” in your CI setup.

• If you’re familiar with the Rust ecosystem, you might (correctly!) note that it’s usually not considered a good target for plugins. dprint works around that by using a WebAssembly runtime (wasmer) as a plugin host. Wasm is not quite as fast as pure native code, but it’s still very fast on a well-tuned runtime, and this also means that you can write a dprint plugin in any language which can target Wasm, which is neat.

• It also has an interface for just shelling out to other commands, so you can even integrate it with existing formatters — handy if, for example, you are doing a transition from Prettier to dprint but want to do it incrementally. You can just run a single command, dprint fmt, and have it execute both your Prettier config and the native dprint plugins, on different sets of the codebase as you migrate over time.

For any front-end project I personally work on, dprint is my go-to tool for autoformatting at this point. If you can use it, I recommend you do!

This all came up because today I fixed a small bug in dprint’s Markdown plugin, and it reminded me that I should write up dprint itself!