Cloudflare, VoidZero and Owner.com's Max Schwenk have introduced tsrs, an experimental Rust port of the TypeScript compiler being developed with the TypeScript team and incubated in the Oxc JavaScript toolchain. Cloudflare announced the collaboration on October 20, positioning the project as a performance and portability effort rather than a new language fork.
Early tests reported by Cloudflare show tsrs running as much as eight times faster than TypeScript 7.0 while using about 70% less memory when both use the same number of type-checking workers. Those figures are project benchmarks, not independent measurements. Cloudflare said the comparison was configured with input from the TypeScript team, and also noted that TypeScript 7.1 beta itself can be up to 2.5 times faster than version 7.0.
The collaborators say TypeScript's maintainers will remain responsible for the language's design and direction. Tsrs is intended to follow the established implementation closely, because differences in language behavior would undermine compatibility over time. Some performance work from the Rust project has already been contributed upstream, according to Cloudflare, and the team plans to offer additional improvements to TypeScript's Go codebase where possible.
Rust also gives the project a route into WebAssembly environments. Cloudflare argues that Rust's memory model is better suited than Go's to compact Wasm deployments because a Go build must include its garbage collector. A smaller, more efficient compiler could make complete development systems more practical inside browsers, embedded hardware and sandboxed cloud environments. That is significant for tools that repeatedly perform builds, checks and deployments under tight memory limits.
Tsrs is not yet presented as a finished replacement. Cloudflare acknowledged differences from upstream TypeScript, including the order in which diagnostics appear, and said it aims to minimize those gaps before a stable release. The group is also working with developer Theo Browne to combine tsc-rs and tsrs into one package intended to support TypeScript features including the Language Server Protocol and content mappers.
Developers can try an experimental release through the tsrs package on npm. Its adaptive default configuration may use more memory in exchange for greater speed depending on the host machine, so results can differ from the fixed-worker benchmark. Teams evaluating it should test both compatibility and resource use on their own projects rather than treating the headline figures as a universal result.
For Cloudflare, the project fits a wider investment in Rust-based JavaScript tooling including Vite, Rolldown, Oxlint and Oxfmt. The company has identified type-aware linting in Oxlint as one possible future integration. The immediate test for tsrs, however, is whether it can preserve TypeScript behavior while turning its promising early performance into a maintainable, stable compiler.
