Peter Steinberger says OpenClaw moved to tsrs, a new Rust port of the TypeScript compiler, and it runs about 5 times faster
Moved to tsrs over the weekend. Drop-in replacement. Around 5x faster for OC. Kind of amazing that it took Microsoft a team and two years to rewrite the TS compiler in go, and now you can just let an agent rip and get sth significantly better within weeks.
Context
Faster TypeScript compiling speeds up builds and checks for developers, and AI written ports show how quickly agents can rebuild core tools.
Peter Steinberger created OpenClaw, an open source AI agent project. tsrs is a Rust port of the TypeScript compiler announced on October 20 by VoidZero, the company behind the Vite and Oxc JavaScript tools.
Deep dive
On October 20, Peter Steinberger posted that he moved to tsrs over the weekend, that it was a drop in replacement, and that it is around 5 times faster for OC, meaning his project OpenClaw.
He added his opinion that it is kind of amazing that it took Microsoft a team and two years to rewrite the TypeScript compiler in Go, and now you can just let an agent rip and get something significantly better within weeks.
He was quoting VoidZero's announcement of tsrs, which said it is not forking TypeScript and is working in close collaboration with the TypeScript team. VoidZero claimed tsrs is up to 8 times faster than TypeScript 7.0 with about 70% less memory, runs in WebAssembly so it works in browsers and on Cloudflare Workers, and will soon be part of the Oxc toolchain.
TypeScript 7.0 is Microsoft's port of the TypeScript compiler to the Go language, which itself promised large speedups over the original. Steinberger's 5 times figure is his own measurement for one project, and VoidZero's figures are its own.
Steinberger's suggestion that agents built tsrs is his framing: VoidZero's announcement post does not say how much of the port was written by AI agents.
What to expect next
Watch for independent benchmarks comparing tsrs with TypeScript 7.0 on large codebases, and for how fully tsrs matches TypeScript's type checking in edge cases. Also watch whether Microsoft's TypeScript team comments on the collaboration VoidZero describes, and whether VoidZero says how much AI was used to write the port. More large projects switching would be the clearest sign it is ready.