Should I use JSLint or JSHint JavaScript validation?

Question

I am currently validating my JavaScript against JSLint and making progress on, it's assisting me to write better JavaScript - in particular in working with the Jquery library.

I have now come across JSHint, a fork of JSLint.
So I am wondering for web applications, which are very much JavaScript was driven, which is the better or most applicable validation tool to work against:

• JSLint or JSHint?

I want to decide now on a validation mechanism and moving forward, use this for client side validation.

And Difference between jshint and jslint? Please explain in single javascript example.

Links:

1. jshint- http://www.jshint.com/

2. jslint- http://jslint.com/

Answer 1

tl;dr takeaway:

If you're looking for a very high standard for yourself or team, JSLint. But its not necessarily THE standard, just A standard, some of which comes to us dogmatically from a javascript god named Doug Crockford. If you want to be a bit more flexible, or have some old pros on your team that don't buy into JSLint's opinions, or are going back and forth between JS and other C-family languages on a regular basis, try JSHint.

long version:

The reasoning behind the fork explains pretty well why JSHint exists:

http://badassjs.com/post/3364925033/jshint-an-community-driven-fork-of-jslint http://anton.kovalyov.net/2011/02/20/why-i-forked-jslint-to-jshint/

So I guess the idea is that it's "community-driven" rather than Crockford-driven. In practicality, JSHint is generally a bit more lenient (or at least configurable or agnostic) on a few stylistic and minor syntactical "opinions" that JSLint is a stickler on.

As an example, if you think both the A and B below are fine, or if you want to write code with one or more of the aspects of A that aren't available in B, JSHint is for you. If you think B is the only correct option... JSLint. I'm sure there are other differences, but this highlights a few.

A) Passes JSHint out of the box - fails JSLint

(function() {
  "use strict";
  var x=0, y=2;
  function add(val1, val2){
    return val1 + val2;
  }
  var z;
  for (var i=0; i<2; i++){
    z = add(y, x+i);
  }
})();

B) Passes Both JSHint and JSLint

(function () {
    "use strict";
    var x = 0, y = 2, i, z;
    function add(val1, val2) {
       return val1 + val2;
    }
    for (i = 0; i < 2; i += 1) {
        z = add(y, x + i);
    }
}());

Personally I find JSLint code very nice to look at, and the only hard features of it that I disagree with are its hatred of more than one var declaration in a function and of for-loop var i = 0 declarations, and some of the whitespace enforcements for function declarations.

A few of the whitespace things that JSLint enforces, I find to be not necessarily bad, but out of sync with some pretty standard whitespace conventions for other languages in the family (C, Java, Python, etc...), which are often followed as conventions in Javascript as well. Since I'm writing in various of these languages throughout the day, and working with team members who don't like Lint-style whitespace in our code, I find JSHint to be a good balance. It catches stuff that's a legitimate bug or really bad form, but doesn't bark at me like JSLint does (sometimes, in ways I can't disable) for the stylistic opinions or syntactic nitpicks that I don't care for.

A lot of good libraries aren't Lint'able, which to me demonstrates that there's some truth to the idea that some of JSLint is simply just about pushing 1 version of "good code" (which is, indeed, good code). But then again, the same libraries (or other good ones) probably aren't Hint'able either, so, touché.