The next version of TypeScript is out in beta, even though it's only a month since the previous release. TypeScript 1.8 has expanded JSX support and adds support for ChakraCore.

The new beta also has JavaScript compilation improvements. Writing about the new versionin a post on the TypeScript blog, Bowden Kelly of Microsoft says that another significant improvement is that the:

"TypeScript compiler can now consume JavaScript files alongside TypeScript files."

This eases the pain of converting JavaScript projects to TypeScript, because it means you can bring JavaScript files into the TypeScript compiler, so you can convert one file at a time, so avoiding the situation where you convert the entire project at once and are faced with a large number of compilation errors.

You'll also be able to bundle external JavaScript libaries with the JavaScript emitted by your TypeScript compilation without needing to use a third party bundler such as webpack or browserify. TypeScript 1.8 lets you include the third party JavaScript libraries in your compilation and they will follow your emitted JavaScript wherever it goes.

The improved JSX support means that TypeScript 1.8 can use custom JSX factories with the addition of a compiler flag. You can also use stateless functional components in TSX files, and JSX tags now have syntax highlighting.

The final major change to TypeScript 1.8 is a move to using the ChakraCore JavaScript engine when possible, because of the better performance. Kelly said:

"We found ChakraCore achieved significantly reduced compilation times, outperforming the previous version of Chakra that we were using by 5-20% and Node by 10-50%! Based on these improvements, we have switched to using ChakraCore when possible."

Other improvements to TypeScript 1.8 include features such as F-Bounded polymorphism and string literal types.

TypeScript 1.8 beta is available for Visual Studio 2015, NuGet, npm, and on Github.

More Information

What's New In TypeScript 1.8

TypeScript On Github

Announcing TypeScript 1.8

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