A Comparison of JavaScript Linting Tools

[jhartikainen]

@felgall

all of the rules it uses are there to detect something that has been known to cause issues is scripts. Each rule has a corresponding example of a script that crashed because it didn’t follow that rule.

Not all of them have anything to do with issues. Examples of rules that are purely stylistic:

• Use spaces for indentation, not tabs
• White-space between parameters, function foo( a ) is not allowed, where function foo(a) is.

Although these can actually be disabled using the --white flag, who knows what else it does, since it’s not documented anywhere.

But that defeats the purpose of not having to configure it, as you were saying. Plus, since JSLint doesn’t have a configuration file, you have to remember to use the correct configuration flags whenever you run it.

As a fun factoid, the tabs vs spaces rule was silently added without warnings to JSLint. What if you had written your code in a certain way, and the next day it was decided that you no longer can do it like that? It seems a bit problematic to me. Especially as Douglas is saying new should not be used anymore, and many large codebases use it extensively. What happens if JSLint suddenly decides to not allow it anymore, just like it decided with tabs?