Sure, but a large part of why they never managed to produce anything useful is because SWC/ESBuild basically made the whole Rome architecture obsolete and killed all momentum around the project before they got anywhere.
what has SWC has to do with thier success or failure for Rome? Rome was VC funded, afaik, turbopack still persists despite it being effectively obsolete with vite
Rome was going to be a whole toolchain built completely in Javascript. That was why they started with linting and formatting because they first had to implement the Javascript language parser and AST that was going to be the core of Rome. Linting and formatting was two easy things to start with while the ironed out the parser and AST implementation.
But when SWC/Esbuild came around to prove how much faster and efficient the compilation can be when written in a more performant language like Rust or Go, all hype around Rome died because no one wanted another Javascript toolchain.
Turbopack is backed by Vercel who obviously have a lot more capital behind them, but it's also built on Rust and at least has the potential to compete.
