Dear Community,
With this announcement we’d like to inform you that we are decommissioning SonarLint for Atom. Being open and transparent to our community also means sharing the reasoning and plan for such decisions, and you can therefore find below some additional context and details about what will happen over the next few weeks.
Why?
This Atom extension was introduced around two years ago, and unlike its siblings (SonarLint in Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and VS Code) it has not gained widespread adoption:
- this very community forum has seen few interactions about SonarLint in Atom
- overall, SonarSource has received minimal feedback and suggestion about using SonarLint in Atom
- Atom marketplace data backs up the fact that adoption/usage is low (especially compared to SonarLint in others IDE’s Marketplace)
We can also only be transparent about another aspect of our reasoning here, which is technical maintenance:
- while we’ve been able to create a first version with minimal feature set, adding more functionality represents a much more substantial effort (while at the same time we’ve had minimal feedback on initial feature set, per points above)
- as a result, it has never been at par with the feature-set offered by SonarLint in other IDEs
What is going to happen over the next few weeks?
This announcement is the first part of a process that we intend to make transparent and clear. Here’s what you can expect to follow from here:
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an update of the Marketplace entry of the SonarLint package for Atom (will happen with a dummy release), making the end-of-life clear, and linking to this announcement
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GitHub open-source sonarlint-atom repository will be publicly archived (to make it read-only for all users and indicate that it’s no longer actively maintained)
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overall SonarLint content (e.g. sonarlint.org, including mentions in the SonarSource product ecosystem) will also be updated
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the package will be unpublished from the Atom Marketplace in a future date. There is no hurry there, what matters is that the news and status is communicated clearly and available to all. Related feedback and discussions are obviously open, and only after that will we completely remove the Atom package.
Hopefully, our rationale is clear. Our intention at SonarSource has always been to provide the best products and best experience. Challenging the status-quo is one of our core values, and that means being able to take such decisions when we think it’s fair, while also allowing for focusing and investing more in products that are thriving.