Typescript rewritten in go

Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft): Today I’m excited to announce the next steps we’re taking to radically improve TypeScript performance. - devblogs.microsoft.com

Typescript is one of the most popular programming languages in web development and is used by many well-known frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular and others.

Why TypeScript is so popular and how it is converted into JavaScript

TypeScript is so popular because it is an extended version of JavaScript that enables static typing. This means that developers can assign clearly defined types to variables and functions. As a result, many typical errors are detected during development, even before the code is actually executed. This leads to better code quality, better readability and easier maintainability. TypeScript also offers modern functions such as interfaces, enums and generics, which considerably simplifies work on larger projects.

Conversion to JavaScript TypeScript is not directly understood by the browser. It is therefore converted into pure JavaScript using a so-called TypeScript compiler (tsc) - a process known as transpilation (source-to-source compilers). During transpilation, the TypeScript-specific features are removed and what remains is standard-compliant JavaScript that can be executed in any browser.

Project corsa

Microsoft is working on a project called “Project Corsa”, in which the TypeScript compiler and associated tools are ported into native code. The current TypeScript compiler is written entirely in TypeScript, which offers many advantages but also causes performance problems, especially for large projects.

With Project Corsa, Microsoft is developing a new TypeScript compiler in Go that is 10x faster than the existing TypeScript compiler, works in parallel and relies on modern architecture principles. The improvement is so significant that the compiler reacts extremely quickly even on large projects. This will drastically speed up development work with TypeScript and at the same time open up new possibilities for integrating AI tools.

Porting to Go

Microsoft is not porting the TypeScript compiler from scratch, but step by step. Functions are transferred one-to-one from TypeScript to Go so that the same logic is retained and there is no change in the way types are checked.

Why Go?

Go offers optimizations for native code on all platforms.
Provides automatic memory management (garbage collector) and allows the use of cyclic data structures.
Strong support for parallel processing, which is extremely beneficial for compiler work.

Parallelization

Parsing, binding and emission of the code can be completely parallelized, resulting in an enormous increase in speed.
The type checker itself is divided into four separate type checkers, each of which processes different files in parallel.

LSP integration (Language Server Protocol)

The new compiler will work with LSP (Language Server Protocol), making it compatible with modern development tools.
This enables better integration with editors and makes the system more flexible.

I am looking forward to this innovation which comes with Typescript 7.

Find out more: Github typescript-go , devblogs.microsoft.com