Introducing tsrs: A port of TypeScript to Rust

Cloudflare and VoidZero are now working with Max Schwenk of Owner.com on tsrs , a Rust port of the TypeScript compiler. We are doing this work in close collaboration with the TypeScript team, and incubating tsrs as part of the Oxc JavaScript compiler toolchain . Our goal is to help developers spend less time waiting for their code to be checked and more time building. Making TypeScript faster and more memory-efficient also helps bring complete development environments to more places, including right in your browser. To be clear, we are not forking TypeScript. We believe the TypeScript team should remain in full control of the language’s design and direction. They have maintained a long-term vision while guiding TypeScript’s adoption across the JavaScript community. We do not want to change that. The TypeScript team can move quite fast on many things, but for some features they may spend years intentionally exploring options and making prototypes before picking the right implementation. A Rust port has to follow those decisions closely, or it will eventually fall apart and become incompatible. We have to preserve the TypeScript language strictly based on its original implementation – and the TypeScript team should remain solely responsible for deciding what that looks like. Performance and memory improvements Early benchmarks of our Rust port of TypeScript are promising: tsrs is up to 8x faster and uses ~70% less memory compared to TypeScript 7.0 when using the same number of type check workers: As you can see, the next version of TypeScript already brings many performance improvements, making TypeScript 7.1 beta up to 2.5x faster than TypeScript 7.0. Some of these optimizations were upstreamed from tsrs , and we’re hoping to find more. You may have seen recent benchmarks of different TypeScript ports with various performance claims, often due to using larger machine types and different options compared to TypeScript’s defaults. We worked with the TypeScript team to ensure the above benchmarks are comparing the same configuration. By default, tsrs ships with an adaptive configuration dependent on the machine type that uses more memory but is even faster: Try tsrs TypeScript in Rust aims to be a faithful port of TypeScript. You can try an experimental release by installing the tsrs package from npm: npm install tsrs npx tsrs Why now? We’ve seen many attempts at porting TypeScript to other languages over the years. Because of the complexity involved, only …