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by martpie 1366 days ago
Rome (written in Rust) is trying to be a faster tsc (amongst other things, like a faster webpack, babel, prettier, etc)

https://rome.tools/#development-status

1 comments

Rome’s journey is effectively over - the founders couldn’t make it work after raising a VC round, and I wouldn’t expect it to go GA.
What do you mean by "make it work"? They've raised 4.5M last year, did they just burn through that?
It appears from their repo that they have 5-6 people working full time on this. Assuming about 250k per developer that puts their burn at 6 * 250k = 1.5 million a year. So yeah they have some time. Although I would be severely concerned at their progress considering it’s already been a year and they don’t seem to have shipped much. No proof of PMF or any sort of revenue with over a third of their runway depleted should have them hustling to get on the boards.
The repo still looks pretty active, which seems contrary to your statement.
If you're looking for evidence in the public repo, consider what's not in there: one co-founder is missing, and so are the commits from the other author/co-founder for over a year. Not the signals you want in a dev-tooling project.
I found it interesting that a good chunk of outside contributions[1] happened before funding, and have almost completely stopped.

[1] https://github.com/rome/tools/graphs/contributors

Or you could look to see if new work is being released. Most recent one was just 17 days ago.

https://twitter.com/rometools/status/1567169157891776514

Except how many users do they have? If I were a VC fund looking to give them another round, I’d want to know their metrics, whether that’s users, downloads, or revenue. Judging by their blog, it’s been a year since they raised the money. Have they produced anything other than a bunch of code? Because code isn’t worth much without users.