Microsoft: Native porting to Go should make TypeScript ten times faster

Microsoft has unveiled new plans for its TypeScript programming language that are designed to deliver a tenfold acceleration and provide a foundation for improved handling of AI tools. Behind this is the porting to a new, native implementation of tools and compilers in the Go programming language, which the development team is currently working on.

Solving existing performance problems

TypeScript can have long loading and testing times in projects with huge code bases, as the development team explains. This is set to change in the future: The team wants to make it possible for developers to rename their variables, find all references to a specific function and easily navigate through their codebase without experiencing delays. In addition, new AI-based use cases benefit from large windows with semantic information, and faster command line builds are also among the development team’s goals.

To achieve these goals, the team has started work on a native implementation for TypeScript compilers and tools in Go. This should significantly speed up the editor start time, shorten build times by up to ten times and greatly reduce memory consumption.

Go code can already be created and executed from the repo in which the work is taking place. This requires Go 1.24 or higher, Node.js with the package manager npm and the task runner hereby. As can be read in the repo, bugs are still to be expected in this work-in-progress. In the long term, its contents are to be integrated into the microsoft/TypeScript repo.

The FAQ on native implementation explains why Go was chosen.

Speed in comparison

The new, native implementation can already handle many popular TypeScript projects, including the TypeScript compiler itself. The development team shows the execution times of tsc on some popular codebases on GitHub in a table:

Table: speed advantages of native implementation in comparison (Source: Microsoft Developer Blog)

Schedule for the faster TypeScript

A native implementation of tsc-capable command line typechecking is to be released as a preview by mid-2025. A feature-complete solution for project builds and a language service should be ready by the end of this year.

TypeScript is currently available in version 5.8. This will be followed by version 5.9 and the 6.x series, which will continue to build on the JavaScript-based code base. When the native codebase has reached sufficient parity with the current TypeScript, TypeScript 7.0 will be released.

The TypeScript team is introducing the distinction between TypeScript 6 (JS) and TypeScript 7 (TS). Developers may also come across the terms “Strada” – the original TypeScript code name – or “Corsa” for the current efforts in discussions and code comments.

Further information on the TypeScript revision can be found on Microsoft’s developer blog. If you want to ask questions directly to the TypeScript team, you can participate in an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) round via Discord on March 13, 2025 at 18:00 CET.

(mai)