Member-only story
Microsoft’s Bold Move: Rewriting TypeScript in Go
In a surprising announcement on March 12, 2025, Microsoft revealed that it will completely rewrite TypeScript, one of modern web development's most important programming languages. Even more surprising was their choice of language for the rewrite: Go, a language developed by their competitor Google.
The Problem with TypeScript
TypeScript has gained enormous popularity as a superset of JavaScript, adding strong typing capabilities that help developers build more robust applications. However, it suffers from a fundamental limitation — the TypeScript compiler is itself written in TypeScript.
This self-hosting nature creates inherent bottlenecks when it comes to performance optimization. The language lacks support for low-level optimization features like direct memory access and native multithreading, which limits how efficient the compiler can become.
Why Go?
Microsoft’s decision to use Go rather than one of their own languages like C# or C++ has raised eyebrows across the development community. According to Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of TypeScript (as well as Turbo Pascal and C#), the choice was driven by several factors:
- Speed: Early benchmarks show the…