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when we started the project I was like
yeah well let's see you know where
Microsoft maybe maybe we'll get like 25%
of the community to take an interest or
or that would have been success but to
get to this point I'm floored you know
and our entire team is floored and and
and super grateful obviously you know
that our work is is that relevant to
that many people there's nothing more
satisfying than working on something
that you know is making a
TypeScript from day one was self-hosted
right uh and written in itself and that
meant that TypeScript the compiler the
tool set everything runs simply as a
JavaScript app precisely because of this
massive adoption and and like the ever
growing size of projects that that our
users build. You know scalability has
just become the number one issue. As
much as it pained us to to give up on on
self-hosting, we also knew that we just
could not bring any more performance.
And so we experimented with different
languages. We experimented with C. We
experimented with with a bunch of other
stuff. We ended up choosing Go as the
language to port to. We quickly realized
we could get 10x half of it from being
in native code and the other half of it
from being able to take advantage of
shared memory concurrency. You can't
just like ignore 10x. Do you know what I
mean? God damn. That changes everything.
That makes things that took minutes
instead take 10 seconds.
You have to go with it, right? And we
really have a compiler now in native
code that functionally is a carbon copy
of the old compiler. I mean like down to
the quirks. And that means the community
doesn't have to throw it all away.
Open source is a big experiment, right?
And then we're talking about like like
these issues of like like no one's
really figured out how to fund open
source, but yet there it is and it's
bigger than ever, right? And and and
it's not going away and it's and it just
keeps on growing and there's more and
more knowledge and ability that we're
capturing in all of this code that
that's out there. There's a lot of noise
too. uh and a lot of it isn't being
maintained and whatever but still it's
like it's like it's evolution captured
you know right there and this notion now
that we have like we've been on GitHub
for 12 years we have 12 years of history
captured in there right searchable like
if I know someone talked about we we did
there was an issue on this somewhere
let's let's just find it now the search
could be better
um and I'm I'm sure AI hopefully will
help on on that too right but but it's
air. There's so much value there, you
know, and and and I'm just I'm so
pleased that that it continues to grow
uh and survive.
I've had a lot of people ask me, "Oh,
why don't you go design the perfect
programming language for AI to target?"
AI's abilities in a particular writing
code in a particular language is
directly proportional to how much of
that code it has seen because it is a
big regurgitator if you will of stuff
that someone has done with some
extrapolation on on top of it right and
well we we know from the data right that
AI has seen a lot of JavaScript and a
lot of Python and a lot of TypeScript
and therefore it's pretty darn good at
writing code in those languages and so
the best language anguage for AI is the
language that AI has seen a lot of and
that means you don't new programming
languages are actually disadvantaged.
We want a very deterministic outcome
here. We want to port half a million
lines of code and know that they do
exactly what the old lines of code did.
If you ask AI to translate them, it
might hallucinate a little bit here and
there and whatever. And now you got to
like go carefully examine every line of
code. And so that's probably not the the
best way to do these massive ports. It
might actually be better to ask AI to
generate a program that helps you do the
port because then when you run that
program, you get a deterministic
outcome. We have a whole bunch of pull
requests that have happened in the old
codebase whilst we were building the new
codebase like hundreds of them that we
need to get moved over. Now we've
actually been using AI fairly
successfully to do that, right? where
you don't have to go in and oh god now
because now there's some there's enough
body that that AI can look at and AI's
gotten good enough that we can automate
some of that.
AI started out being the assistant but
you were still in control sitting in the
ID and it was just aiding you and typing
faster and completing stuff faster,
right? But now it's switching around.
The AI is doing the work, right? and and
you're supervising what it's doing and
and it doesn't necessarily need an IDE
in the same way that we need idees,
right? it still needs the services and
that's why like all of this MCP stuff is
becoming interesting and and and
connecting language services to MCP and
and having giving AI the ability to ask
semantic questions or or refactoring
questions or whatever and get sort of
boxed in determinism around certain
workflows, right? But still do sort of
the equivalent of what you would do in
an IDE but do it the LLM way or the
agent way. Um, that's going to change
development tools dramatically.
Join Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of TypeScript and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, as he reacts to the key findings from the Octoverse 2025 report. Hear his unique perspective on TypeScript's evolution, the role of Go, how AI is changing language creation, and the future of developer workflows. #Octoverse #SoftwareDevelopment #GitHub Read the full Octoverse 2025 report: https://gh.io/octoverse — CHAPTERS — 00:00 - Introduction: Anders Hejlsberg reacts 00:29 - Why the shift from TypeScript to Go? 01:46 - How open source has evolved 02:50 - Is AI changing how languages are created? 04:33 - How AI has changed the developer workflow Stay up-to-date on all things GitHub by subscribing and following us at: YouTube: http://bit.ly/subgithub Blog: https://github.blog X: https://twitter.com/github LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/github Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/github TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@github Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GitHub/ About GitHub: It’s where over 100 million developers create, share, and ship the best code possible. It’s a place for anyone, from anywhere, to build anything—it’s where the world builds software. https://github.com