Development is happening in the open on GitHub in a separate repository from the JavaScript release. For now, there isn’t a public binary release, but that doesn’t stop you from taking the current code base and compiling your own tools to give it a try. Microsoft provides instructions for building the Go-based TypeScript compiler, as well as the related Language Server with support for Visual Studio Code.
Build it yourself
Building the new TypeScript compiler and language server is relatively straightforward. You’ll need to install a few prerequisites before getting started: an up-to-date version of the Go compiler, as well as the Node.js JavaScript platform and the hereby task runner. If you’ve not used hereby before, it’s a Node.js-based tool for chaining tasks together and is used to orchestrate the TypeScript build process. Different runners are available for different outputs: one to build the compiler, one to build the tests, one to make sure the code is properly linted, and more.
Technically you don’t need to use hereby and can work with Go’s own tool, but using hereby does simplify things. One important point, if you haven’t installed hereby as a global tool, you can use npm’s npx command to launch and run the task runner. So, instead of using hereby build to run a build, simply use npx hereby build. This gives you the same output without the complexity of editing paths.
