Is this project abandoned?

[vitaly-t]

So many open issues and PR-s, and not a single release in 4 years, begs a question of whether the project's support is dead.

[rajmondx]

The situation is weird. This repository obv. gets some commits done but as you pointed out there was no release since 4y.

From https://github.com/eslint/espree

Why another parser
ESLint had been relying on Esprima as its parser from the beginning. While that was fine when the JavaScript language was evolving slowly, the pace of development increased dramatically and Esprima had fallen behind. ESLint, like many other tools reliant on Esprima, has been stuck in using new JavaScript language features until Esprima updates, and that caused our users frustration.

We decided the only way for us to move forward was to create our own parser, bringing us inline with JSHint and JSLint, and allowing us to keep implementing new features as we need them. We chose to fork Esprima instead of starting from scratch in order to move as quickly as possible with a compatible API.

With Espree 2.0.0, we are no longer a fork of Esprima but rather a translation layer between Acorn and Esprima syntax. This allows us to put work back into a community-supported parser (Acorn) that is continuing to grow and evolve while maintaining an Esprima-compatible parser for those utilities still built on Esprima.

Have you tried working with Esprima?
Yes. Since the start of ESLint, we've regularly filed bugs and feature requests with Esprima and will continue to do so. However, there are some different philosophies around how the projects work that need to be worked through. The initial goal was to have Espree track Esprima and eventually merge the two back together, but we ultimately decided that building on top of Acorn was a better choice due to Acorn's plugin support.