Code quality tools such as linters and testing frameworks are an important part for developers. Linters play the role of keeping the code error-free and ensuring that it conforms to the rules put in place in the team. Conversely, when these tools work slowly, they can slow down development to a great extent, writes Analytics India Mag.
Recently, there has been a buzz in the community about a new tool in this domain called Ruff. Charlie Marsh, an alumnus of Khan Academy, launched the tool on August 30 last year, but in the five months that have passed, Ruff has become very popular. Marsh admits that the Ruff’s sudden popularity surprised him, which is why he named it “Ruff.”
Ruff now has become the primary linter for some of the most important Python-based projects like Pandas, FastAPI, Apache Airflow and Jupyter on GitHub even as it gets high praise from the community.
Last month, Marsh wrote a blog post discussing where he wanted to take Ruff in the future.
“I meant to write this post after the first 100 releases, but now (v0.0.226) seems as good a time as any to recap the progress we’ve made over the last few months, and share more on where we’re headed,”
he stated.
There’s a good reason to have more Rust-based tools.
“While Rust is an object-oriented language like C++, it combines less energy consumption with faster speed. Earlier, it used to take me around 21 seconds, but once I switched to the Rust-based SWC, it took me between 2 to 3 seconds”,
Karthik Devaraj, a full-stack developer with MachineHack explains.
Marsh felt that the Python environment too could gain from similar faster tools. Ruff has been found to be over 150X faster than Flake8, a popular Python lint wrapper; 75X faster than pycodestyle, the official linter to check Python for the PEP8 Python style; and 50X faster than pylint.
A few days ago, Marsh announced on Twitter the happy news that open source platform Hugging Face has now adopted Ruff. Developer at the company are extremely welcoming and are looking forward to working with Ruff, as according to them it is much faster compared to its competitors.
