How Native TypeScript Can Boost Your Build Speed by 10×

Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft Technical Fellow and chief architect of TypeScript, announced a major performance initiative for the language.

TypeScript’s core value lies in delivering an excellent developer experience, but large codebases can suffer from long load and check times. The new native implementation aims to dramatically improve editor startup, reduce build times to a tenth of current durations, and lower memory usage.

By porting the compiler and tools to a native implementation, a preview of a command‑line

tsc

is expected by mid‑2025, with a full solution for project builds and language services by the end of the year.

Developers can build and run the Go‑based native repository, which shares the same license as the existing TypeScript codebase. The README provides instructions for building and running

tsc

and the language server.

How Much Speed Gain?

The native implementation already loads many popular TypeScript projects, including the compiler itself. Benchmarks on GitHub show the following execution times for

tsc

:

VS Code – 1,505,000 lines – current 77.8 s – native 7.5 s – 10.4× faster

Playwright – 356,000 lines – current 11.1 s – native 1.1 s – 10.1× faster

TypeORM – 270,000 lines – current 17.5 s – native 1.3 s – 13.5× faster

date‑fns – 104,000 lines – current 6.5 s – native 0.7 s – 9.5× faster

tRPC (server + client) – 18,000 lines – current 5.5 s – native 0.6 s – 9.1× faster

rxjs (observable) – 2,100 lines – current 1.1 s – native 0.1 s – 11.0× faster

These data demonstrate the magnitude of performance improvements you can expect when checking most codebases.

The speed boost enables instant full‑project error lists, advanced refactoring, and previously cost‑prohibitive insights, laying a foundation for next‑generation AI‑driven development tools.

Editor Speed

Since developers spend most of their time in the editor, fast loading of large projects is crucial. With the native language service, loading the entire VS Code codebase drops from about 9.6 seconds to roughly 1.2 seconds, an eight‑fold improvement, and overall memory usage appears to be about half of the current implementation.

All language‑service operations—completion lists, quick info, go‑to‑definition, find‑all‑references—will respond significantly faster, and the shift toward the Language Server Protocol (LSP) provides a long‑term infrastructure alignment.

Version Roadmap

TypeScript 5.8 has just been released, with 5.9 on the way. The JavaScript‑based codebase will continue as the 6.x series, while TypeScript 6.0 will introduce deprecations and breaking changes to align with the upcoming native codebase.

When the native codebase reaches sufficient compatibility, TypeScript 7.0 will be released. Internally these are referred to as “Strada” (original codename) and “Corsa” (project codename).

Some projects may switch to TypeScript 7 at release, while others will remain on 6.x until the native version matures and gains broad adoption.

Next Steps

In the coming months, more details will be shared, including deep performance analyses, new compiler APIs, and LSP work. FAQs are available in the GitHub repository, and an AMA will be held on March 13 at 10 am PT / 5 pm UTC on the TypeScript Community Discord.

The ten‑fold performance boost marks a huge leap for the TypeScript and JavaScript development experience, and the team hopes the community shares their excitement.