TypeScript 3.5 has been released with faster type-checking and incremental builds, as well as smart select when expanding text selections in the editor.

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that was developed by Microsoft. The idea behind it is to add static type-checking to JavaScript so that you can catch issues before you even run your code. TypeScript builds on the ECMAScript standard and includes support for optional static types that are designed to make it easier to use when creating large client or server-side applications. Once created, your TypeScript code then gets transformed into clean, runnable JavaScript. TypeScript includes editor support for Visual Studio 2015 and 2017, Sublime Text 3 and Visual Studio Code.

The first improvement to the speed of type checking is a fix for the slowing down introduced accidentally in the previous release, 3.4. Under some circumstances this dramatically increased the type-checking time, especially when using the styled-components library. This has now been fixed, and TypeScript 3.5 meaning compile times, code completion and any other editor operations should all be faster.

The incremental compiler option that was added in TypeScript 3.4 has been optimized in this release. The option makes use of a saved set of data in a build info file that can be used to speed up subsequent compilations, and in this release the caching has been optimized resulting in a reduction in rebuilding time of as much as 68% compared to TypeScript 3.4.

The other main improvement is the addition of an API for editors to expand text selections farther and farther outward in a way that is syntactically aware. This Smart Select feature means the editor knows which constructs it should expand out to. The developers say this means and you can expect selection expansion in editors like Visual Studio Code to “just work”.

More Information

TypeScript On NuGet

TypeScript On GitHub

Related Articles

TypeScript 3.2 Gets Stricter Checking

TypeScript 3.1 Adds Mappable Tuples

TypeScript 3.0 Adds Project References

TypeScript Adds Unused Span Reporting

TypeScript Adds Conditional Types

TypeScript 2.7 Improves Type Inference

TypeScript 2.5 Adds Optional Catch Binding

TypeScript 2.4 Adds Dynamic Import Expressions  

TypeScript 2.3 Released

TypeScript 2.2 Adds More Code Actions

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info