Microsoft Ditches JS for Go to Make TypeScript 7.0 Up to 12x Faster
Web developers might actually stop crying during build times. Microsoft just dropped a massive update that completely rewrites how our favorite static-typing tool works under the hood, promising to turn agonizing compilation lags into ancient history.
The tech giant has officially released TypeScript 7.0, marking a radical architectural shift by abandoning its own self-hosted compiler in favor of Go. While the previous major milestone launched only a few months ago, this new era completely scraps the old compiler written in TypeScript itself. Instead, the team is transitioning to a custom-built toolchain called tsgo that has been quietly cooking in the open-source kitchen since 2024.
Writing a compiler for a web language in a system language like Go was chosen because of its structural similarity to TypeScript, making the porting process surprisingly clean. But the real kicker is the raw performance gains that come with native multi-threading and optimized memory management. The new compiler absolutely obliterates old assembly benchmarks, showing an 11.9x speedup when rebuilding VS Code, and an 8.9x boost for Sentry.
Memory consumption also took a massive dive, dropping by 26% during Bluesky builds and 18% for VS Code. Even better, type-checking runs are now clocked at up to 16.7 times faster. Developers won't have to throw away their existing codebases either, as the new release maintains near-perfect backward compatibility with version 6.0, allowing both compilers to live side-by-side on the same machine during the transition period.
The irony of rewriting a language's compiler in an entirely different language just to make it usable at scale is peak modern web development. But when the speed gains look like a rocket launch, nobody in the JavaScript ecosystem is going to complain about the sudden betrayal of their beloved node modules.
Source: Microsoft DevBlogs
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