"To meet those goals, we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage."
It's hard to tell if there will even be a runtime that somehow uses TS types to optimize even further (e.g. by proving that a function diverges) but to my knowledge they currently don't and I don't think there's any in the works (or if that's even possible while maintaining runtime soundness, considering you can "lie" to TS by casting to `unknown` and then back to any other type).
Just like if you said faster C++ that could mean the compiler runs faster, or the resulting machine code runs faster.
Just because the compile target is another human readable language doesn’t mean it ceases to be a typescript program.
I didn’t think this particular example was very ambiguous because a general 10x speed up in the resulting JS would be insane, and I have used typescript enough to wish the compiler was faster. Though if we’re being pedantic, which I enjoy doing sometimes, I would say it is ambiguous.
That still wouldn't make sense, in the same way that it wouldn't make sense to say "Python type hints found a way to automatically write more performant Python". With few exceptions, the TypeScript compiler doesn't have any runtime impact at all — it simply removes the type annotations, leaving behind valid JavaScript that already existed as source code. In fact, avoiding runtime impact is an explicit design goal of TypeScript [1].
They've even begun to chip away at the exceptions with the `erasableSyntaxOnly` flag [2], which disables features like enums that do emit code with runtime semantics.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Desi...
[2] https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/release-notes/t...
Sure, lots of build tools do this, but that's not Typescript.
With very few exceptions, Typescript is written so that removing the Typescript-specific things makes it equivalent to the Javascript it transpiles to.
https://betterstack.com/community/guides/scaling-nodejs/node....
If you don't know enough about TypeScript to understand that TypeScript is not a runtime, I'm not sure why you would care about TypeScript being faster (in either case).
I mean I think generally you’d want to click the link and read the article before commenting
Yeah, that exists. AssemblyScript has an AOT compiler that generates binaries from statically typed code.
Typescript's type system is unsound so it probably will never be very useful for an optimizing compiler. That was never the point of TS however.
I don't think that is too far fetched either since typescript already has most of the type information.
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for TS!!
It would be possible that MS wrote a TypeScript compiler that emits native binaries and that made the language 10x faster, why not?
Except in the case of Doom, which can run on anything.
If someone posted an article talking about the "handedness" of DNA or something, I wouldn't complain "oh, you confused me, I thought you were saying DNA has hands!"
I agree with pseudopersonal in that the title should be changed. technically it's not misleading, but not everyone uses or is familiar with typescript.
