Writers have it easy for the most part when they are writing a piece. With tools like Microsoft Word, Google Docs and other spell-checking solutions, it is easy to pinpoint where you made a mistake. For developers who are writing code that looks like a foreign language to anyone else, it can be difficult catching problems early on, if at all. JSHint wants to help. The open-source project is a tool designed to help JavaScript developers detect typos and other mistakes.

“JSHint is a community-driven tool to detect errors and potential problems in JavaScript code and to enforce your team’s coding conventions,” according to its GitHub page. “It is very flexible so you can easily adjust it to your particular coding guidelines and the environment you expect your code to execute in. JSHint is open source and will always stay this way.”

JSHint points out potential problems such as syntax errors, bugs and leaking variables. Companies who have used it include Mozilla, Facebook, Twitter, Red Hat, jQuery and Zendesk.

JSHint originated from the JSLint project in 2010, and has been maintained by several developers. The latest update, version 2.9.2, was released last month with bug fixes.

The creators of JSHint note that the program isn’t designed to detect whether a program is correct, fast or contains memory leaks. Developers should pair JSHint with unit and functional tests and perform their own code reviews.

“Any codebase eventually becomes huge at some point, and simple mistakes—that would not show themselves when written—can become show stoppers and waste hours of debugging. And this is when static code-analysis tools come into play and help developers to spot such problems,” according JSHint’s GitHub page.

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