TypeScript Switches To Go — What Does This Mean for Developers?

Microsoft (the company behind TypeScript) and its TypeScript team unveiled the biggest update yet, announcing a switch from JavaScript to Go on March 11th, 2025. This means TypeScript will receive up to 10x performance gain than its current implementation.

This is a huge win for developers as it will drastically cut down editor start-up time for significantly large projects as well as improve build time.

Why Go (Golang)?

The Typescript team was considering Rust as well as C#, but according to Anders Hejlsberg — lead architect of TypeScript — porting to Go (Golang) was the way of least resistance.

"C# was a top contender for the port, as was Rust. But both would have been a rewrite more than a port. We picked Go because it was the path of least resistance to 10x for this particular code base. It's a win for OSS. We couldn't have done this in the past!" - Anders Hejlsberg on X (formerly Twitter)

Also, Go is structurally similar to the implementation of TypeScript and it closely resembles existing patterns in the TypeScript code. That's why they are calling it a port than a rewrite. Read this discussion to know more on why Go was the preferred choice among many other suitable programming languages.

A Win for Developers

Here's what the TypeScript port to Go a.k.a Golang means for software developers:

• Improved Editor Startup
• Reduced Memory Usage
• Faster Builds
• Improved Overall Efficiency

As shown in the image above, the typescript-go version of TypeScript drastically improved build times when running tsc on the listed codebases.

I have worked with significantly large projects involving TypeScript and I can say that it takes a ton of time to load Visual Studio Code and get the TypeScript interpreter running (especially on Windows). The RAM usage is off the charts as well with larger TypeScript codebases.

Microsoft claims that using the go-based typescript version, it takes 8 times less than what it currently takes to load the editor (for VSCode codebase), i.e, an 8x performance improvement in the editor start-up time.

When will it be released?

The most recent version of TypeScript is 5.8, and it will not be until version 7.0 that the Go port will be released. So, the last JavaScript based TypeScript version will be version 6 (6.x series) which they call it by the codename "Strada". The codename for the Go based TypeScript version (7.0) is "Corsa".

So, in the future, there will be two versions of TypeScript written in two different languages — TypeScript 6 (JS based) and TypeScript 7 (Go based). Note that TypeScript does not follow semantic versioning.