When Rome Tools ran out of money and its founder disappeared, its core team forked the project as Biome before archiving the original. The fork is now one of the most popular developer tools on the planet, with a monthly download count in the millions.
Rust-based linter, formatter, and JavaScript/TypeScript analysis tool forked from Rome's codebase. Biome kept Rome's architecture and added what Rome never had: a plugin system, performance benchmarks, a governance model, and a release cadence. Fully compatible with ESLint and Prettier configurations, which made migration trivial.
Rome was the brainchild of Sebastian McKenzie, the creator of Babel and Yarn, who announced it in 2020 as a 'unified toolchain' that would replace the JavaScript ecosystem's pile of linters and formatters with a single fast tool. It was incubated at Meta, then spun out as Rome Tools Inc. in 2021 with a $4.5M seed round, and in 2022 rewrote itself in Rust - a prescient bet that made the project blazing fast. Then the money ran out. Rome's last release, version 10, shipped in November 2022; by early 2023 the team was being laid off and the project was in limbo, with McKenzie unreachable and the repository, domains, and Discord locked down.
In August 2023 the remaining core team - Emanuele Stoppa, Denis Bezrukov, Victorien Elvinger, and Daiki Nishikawa - announced a fork called Biome, explicitly billing it as 'the official fork of Rome' and promising to continue the mission. 'Many attempts to reach out to the current owner were all void,' Stoppa wrote. 'There was only one thing I could do.' The rome/tools repository was archived the same week. Biome then did what Rome had only promised: shipped releases, built a plugin system, won developer mindshare, and grew into one of the most-used developer tools on the market, with millions of monthly downloads, the 2024 DevTools Excellence Award from JSNation, and a 2.0 release in June 2025.
Sebastian McKenzie announces Rome.
Rome Tools Inc. raises $4.5 million in seed funding.
Rome v10 is released - its final release.
Biome is announced as 'the official fork of Rome'.
The rome/tools repository is archived.
Biome 2.0 is released.
“Rome would have been the best toolchain ever built - if it had money.”
“Many attempts to reach out to the current owner were all void. There was only one thing I could do: fork it.”
Biome took the most hyped dead project in the JavaScript ecosystem and made it real: the fork succeeded where the VC-backed original failed, with no funding at all. It is now the default toolchain for a large share of the JS community and the clearest proof that an abandoned repository with a great idea is just a fork away from relevance.