Microsoft has announced the immediate availability of TypeScript 1.1 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The new release is available for Visual Studio “14” CTP4, Visual Studio 2013, and npm, as well as a source release.
TypeScript 1.1 is a full compiler rewrite that aims to be lightweight and fast. Microsoft claims that the new compiler brings a 4x performance improvement over version 1.0.2, as per the benchmark results shown in the picture below. Furthermore, the new release also lays the groundwork for future language features.
Another important feature of version 1.1 compiler is compatibility with projects built with the 1.0 compiler. This, though, may require manually changing the TypeScriptToolsVersion entry in the .csproj file may be required to ensure that Visual Studio will use the new 1.1 CTP tools.
As stated in Microsoft announcement, more work is needed to fully integrate TypeScript 1.1 with Visual Studio, which at the moment still uses the 1.0 compiler for IntelliSense, code navigation, error reporting, and other editing tools.
TypeScript is a free and open source superset of JavaScript supporting type annotations and compile-time type checking, interfaces, classes, and modules. TypeScript compiles to readable, standards-based JavaScript and can be tried out using its Playground.