The Adoption of JavaScript Linters in Practice: A Case Study on ESLint

Abstract

A linter is a static analysis tool that warns software developers about possible code errors or violations to coding standards. By using such a tool, errors can be surfaced early in the development process when they are cheaper to fix. For a linter to be successful, it is important to understand the needs and challenges of developers when using a linter. In this paper, we examine developers' perceptions on JavaScript linters. We study why and how developers use linters along with the challenges they face while using such tools. For this purpose we perform a case study on ESLint, the most popular JavaScript linter. We collect data with three different methods where we interviewed 15 developers from well-known open source projects, analyzed over 9,500 ESLint configuration files, and surveyed 337 developers from the JavaScript community. Our results provide practitioners with reasons for using linters in their JavaScript projects as well as several configuration strategies and their advantages. We also provide a list of linter rules that are often enabled and disabled, which can be interpreted as the most important rules to reason about when configuring linters. Finally, we propose several feature suggestions for tool makers and future work for researchers. Category Description Available rules Possible Errors Possible syntax or logic errors in JavaScript code 31 Best Practices Better ways of doing things to avoid various problems 69 Strict Mode Strict mode directives 1 Variables Rules that relate to variable declarations 12 Node.js and CommonJS For code running in Node.js, or in browsers with CommonJS 10 Stylistic Issues Stylistic guidelines where rules can be subjective 81 ECMAScript 6 Rules for new features of ES6 (ES2015) 32 Total 236

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