Comment by plasticeagle

17 hours ago

I love Typescript, I think it's a fascinating language with a great runtime. It's already very fast to execute, but the compile times have been awful. Especially when you start to run production builds with minification and whatnot.

So I'm interested on what exactly has been sped up here. I can see compile times have been, but is that it? I suppose the runtime itself was always native code, and already very fast.

What do you mean by runtime? The JavaScript runtimes, like V8? Yeah those are impressively fast for a dynamically typed ”scripting” language, but that has little to do with TS. TypeScript’s work ends at compilation.

The TypeScript compiler is (was) slow, but you don’t need it to minify code. This sounds like some other problem with the tools in your project’s build. (There are faster tools available these days.)

A faster type checker will help with performance problems in text editors since type info is needed for a lot of queries.