TypeScript 7.0 is Here

Today, Microsoft announced the release of TypeScript 7.0, a major update to its strongly typed version of JavaScript. How major? It’s 10 times faster than the previous version.

“Since its early days, TypeScript has promised to deliver on JavaScript that scales,” Microsoft principal product manager Daniel Rosenwasser writes. “By bringing strong type-checking and rich tooling to the world of JavaScript, TypeScript made it possible to build non-trivial high-quality apps across platforms.”

TypeScript 7.0 is a complete rewrite–a native port–of TypeScript written in Go that can take advantage of modern hardware components. The result is astonishing: Microsoft says that TypeScript 7 delivers “native code speed, shared memory multithreading, and a number of new optimizations that typically yield speedups between 8x and 12x on full builds.”

What’s missing, for now, is an API: Microsoft says we can expect a new API with the release of TypeScript 7.1. For now, developers can run TypeScript 6.0 and 7.0 side-by-side so they can take advantage of some utilities and programmatic access to the compiler.

Visual Studio Code already has a TypeScript 7 extension that supports multiple threads so that it can serve simultaneous requests as quickly as possible.

“TypeScript 7.0 is a major milestone in the TypeScript project,” Rossenwasser adds. “This port has been the primary focus of our team for over a year, and with 7.0 out, we will be returning to new feature work, ergonomic improvements, more performance wins, and implementing a new API for the broader ecosystem. While that seems major, we expect a fairly similar timeline to releases prior to TypeScript 7.0, with new featureful versions published every 3-4 months. With TypeScript 7.1 on the horizon, we hope to bridge any gaps to help bring the community forward.”