The TypeScript team is building a new, light-weight compiler core to replace it’s existing one. Early results show upto 5x performance improvements compared to the existing compiler.
The new compiler core started as an experiment, but the initial results prompted the team to grow it into the new TypeScript compiler and Language Service.
Once complete, the new compiler should be drop-in compatible with the existing one. The goal here isn't new compiler features, but rather a cleaner compiler architecture that has better performance and allows us to add new features with greater ease in releases to come.
Some developers claim to have already seen visible difference on larger projects. For instance, user cogware reports -
On a 7kloc codebase it was around 3 seconds before the new compiler, seems to be about 1 second after.
There are still some things left before the new compiler achieves feature parity with the existing compiler. After this the team will work on moving to the ECMAScript 6 features and other user requests.
The TypeScript repository has also been moved to GitHub from CodePlex. Jonathan Turner, Program Manager for the TypeScript team, explains the move as well as the accompanying change in process -
..there's a large developer community on GitHub, and by participating as part of GitHub we can work more closely with that community.
On GitHub, the issues we're tracking will be the official issues and the team will be able to work more closely with users on repros. This will make it more transparent to see what is fixed and when.
You can now keep track of discussions on features and issues on the Github issues page.