TypeScript 4.8 is now a Release Candidate. According to Microsoft, the final release will be available around August 23.
“Between now and the stable release of TypeScript 4.8, we expect no further changes apart from critical bug fixes”, Microsoft program manager Daniel Rosenwasser shared in a blog post.
The development of TypeScript is divided in several phases. A polished beta version qualifies for a Release Candidate (RC). The next step is general availability. The beta phase of TypeScript 4.8 lasted just under a month. Microsoft announced the beta on June 21. The version became a Release Candidate on August 11.
The Release Candidate of TypeScript 4.8 is available through NuGet and the following Node Package Manager command: ‘npm install -D typescript@rc’. The Release Candidate is supported by Visual Studio 2022/2019 and Visual Studio Code.
New in TypeScript 4.8
The Release Candidate’s features are largely the same as the beta’s. A new setting allows files to be ignored during auto-imports, but nothing changed beyond that.
Microsoft expects to launch the official version around August 23. Between now and then, the tech giant has no major changes in mind. Hence, we have an accurate picture of the final release. Microsoft published an overview of all updates on its website.
TypeScript 4.8 performs better than previous releases. Microsoft tinkered with –build, –watch and –incremental to increase speed. “On a fairly large internal codebase, we’ve seen time reductions on the order of 10 percent to 25 percent on many simple common operations, with around 40 percent time reductions in no-change scenarios”, the organization shared.
Popularity
Google’s software department works with TypeScript. One of the developers responded to the release. Though a small portion of Google’s code had to be changed to support TypeScript 4.8, most libraries ran great. “We support the typing improvements”, the developer wrote in a feedback note. “Generally it’s clear what’s changing.”
TypeScript remains wildly popular. The programming language ranked fifth among the most used languages in the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Only JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL and Python saw more use.
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