Microsoft’s New TypeScript 7 Promises 8–12x Faster Builds With Native Go Compiler

Microsoft has released TypeScript 7, a major overhaul of the programming language that replaces its long-standing JavaScript implementation with a native compiler written in Go. 

The company says the new release typically delivers 8–12x faster full builds, with benchmarked projects seeing speedups of up to 11.9x and reduced memory consumption across large codebases.

The new compiler is now available through the standard ‘typescript’ npm package, replacing the earlier preview builds distributed as @typescript/native-preview. 

Microsoft said the native implementation was designed to preserve compatibility with previous TypeScript behaviour while introducing native execution, shared-memory multithreading, and new compiler optimisations.

Microsoft published benchmark results of compile times and memory usage across several large open-source projects. 

The performance gains extend beyond compilation. Microsoft said opening a file containing an error in the VS Code codebase previously took around 17.5 seconds before diagnostics appeared, compared with under 1.3 seconds in TypeScript 7. 

The company added that the new language server has reduced the number of failing language-server commands by more than 80% and server crashes by over 60% compared with TypeScript 6.

A significant part of the speedup comes from native multithreading. TypeScript 7 parallelises parsing, type checking, and code generation, while introducing new ‘--checkers’ and ‘--builders’ options that allow developers to tune parallel execution based on the number of available CPU cores and memory. 

Microsoft said increasing the number of type-checking workers from four to eight pushed some projects beyond 16x faster build times, although this increases memory usage.

Microsoft spent more than a year validating the compiler across large production codebases with internal teams, including Office, Teams, Xbox, and Power BI, as well as companies such as Bloomberg, Canva, Figma, Google, Linear, Notion, Slack, Vercel, and Vanta. 

According to the company, Slack reduced CI type-checking time from about 7.5 minutes to 1.25 minutes, while Microsoft’s News Services team reported saving around 400 hours per month previously spent waiting for CI builds.

The release also introduces a rebuilt ‘--watch’ mode based on a Go port of Parcel's file-watching system, new Language Server Protocol support for editors, and configuration changes inherited from TypeScript 6. 

Some workflows, including Vue, Astro, Svelte, MDX, and Angular template tooling, will continue using TypeScript 6 until the new compiler exposes a stable programmatic API, which Microsoft expects to arrive in a future TypeScript 7.1 release.

The release marks the completion of Microsoft’s Go-based rewrite of TypeScript, first announced in March last year and previously available through the ‘@typescript/native-preview’ package.