Microsoft has unveiled Pyright, an open source static-type-checking system for Python that aims to be faster than existing type-checking solutions for Python such as Mypy.

Written in TypeScript and running on Node.js, Pyright doesn’t require an existing Python runtime. It is chiefly designed to be used as a Visual Studio Code plugin, but can also run as a standalone command-line tool.

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Microsoft claims in the Readme for the project that Pyright is “typically 5X faster” than other Python type checkers that are themselves written in Python, such as Mypy, Pytype, and Pyre. Writing those tools in Python is convenient, but they can only run as fast as Python itself, and Python’s default runtime doesn’t emphasize performance. That said, the performance of these tools aren’t absolutes; it depends mainly on the systems they run on and the code bases they analyze.

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