18 ms·

Angular 11

152 points by amitport 6y ago

DrFell 6y ago
The comments here are mostly about framework clannism. Every framework has it's pros, cons, compromises, and quirks. I picked Angular because it was so advanced. I wanted the challenge, got to work on awesome teams, and learned so much. I'm a better developer today because of it. Thanks, Angular!
vyrotek 6y ago
Congrats to the team! Definitely still loving how productive our small dev team can be using Angular. Sometimes the "batteries included" approach approach gets a bad rap but I really enjoy it.
- beeman 6y ago
  Same here! And folks should not be fooled that we are the only ones. We started a new Angular Community on Discord a few months back and we are already +3500 members and counting! There are interesting discussions daily! Come join us at https://discord.gg/angular https://discord.gg/angular
amitport 6y ago
Changelogs: https://www.github.com/angular/angular/tree/master/CHANGELOG.md https://www.github.com/angular/angular/tree/master/CHANGELOG... https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases/tag/v11.0.0 https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases/tag/v11.0.0 https://github.com/angular/components/releases/tag/11.0.0 https://github.com/angular/components/releases/tag/11.0.0
llimos 6y ago
I feel like Angular is now where jQuery was a few years ago - used to be huge but no-one is starting new projects in it unless they have to, and they keep releasing new versions for the large existing base. The actual updates here are a bit meh tbh.
- __ryan__ 6y ago
  Citation needed.
  - DJBunnies 6y ago
    They clearly said feel, not fact.
  - llimos 6y ago
    https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/ https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/ Look at awareness vs. interest. Lots of people know about it but most of them don't want to use it.
- k__ 6y ago
  While I personally prefer React 90% of the time, I would say with its deep RxJS integration Angular has its merits. Sure, it's miles away from Cycle.js, but Angular has a much bigger eco-system. If I would create a (realtime) data intensive app, I would probably use Angular for it.
  - josteink 6y ago
    > I would say with its deep RxJS integration Angular has its merits That’s funny, because for the exact same reason I’ve taken a strong dislike on it. The rest of NodeJS flows on promises and constantly have to switch between that, and having to use different APIs, and no longer be able to write simple awaitable async code... It drove me mad. Angular without RxJS would be so much better.
    - k__ 6y ago
      Doesn't Node.js mainly flow on callbacks? As far as my experience goes, promises require some extra work too.
    - tashoecraft 6y ago
      Strongly disagree. Rxjs is such a better async pattern than anything else in the javascript ecosystem. The front end shouldn't care what node is doing, especially since not everyone's front end uses node. What I don't like about async await is it changes the pattern you are seeing, intermingling synchronous and asynchronous code based on the correct placement of a keyword, then using try catch blocks to catch errors are just so ugly. Passing my data through a stream of pure functions that transform the data into what I need just feels pleasant to work with, but I do agree it takes awhile to be proficient in it.
_the_inflator 6y ago
Congratulations, Angular team! Looking forward to Webpack 5 integration. A mature framework to develop enterprise applications.
brodo 6y ago
Version 11? Last time I checked they where at 4. Are they using semantic versioning? If yes, that many major versions is a red flag.
- 255kb 6y ago
  Tell that to Java or Nodejs :D
  - jmisavage 6y ago
    True. Node is an interesting one since the odd number releases are for more for testing new features while the even numbered ones are the stable/lts builds. Odd numbered releases are become EOL as soon as the next major release is out. I always try to tell the devs I work with to stick to the even numbered ones because of that.
  - lolive 6y ago
    For Java, it’s easy: - v8: we added functions and streams. It basically changes everything. We also added asynchronous stuff but you don’t care yet. - v11: we added built-in async http. Now you really want to have a look at that asynchronous stuff from v8. And that’s pretty much it.
    - lolive 6y ago
      By the way, we are at Java15 at the moment. And don’t ask me what happened in seasons 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 and 15. Like grey’s anatomy, nobody knows and nobody cares.
      - The_rationalist 6y ago
        Only mediocre developers don't care about mastering their tool, but it seems that such mediocrity is quite institutionalized in the Java ecosystem. Java is evolving very quickly and will soon have e.g pattern matching.
        6y ago
Alir3z4 6y ago
This is lovely. Webpack 5 and its persistent disk cache. Much cleaner build reporting. It has been always annoying to keep an eye on them hidden and shuffled in the build log. Inlining fonts, yesssss. Excellent work. Seeing ngcc speed improvement even by 1% is great where it seems to be up to 4x speedup. We have bit Angular code base and smaller ones and every single of Angular features in this release is helpful regardless of the size of the code base. Thank you Angular and everyone involved <3
ktpsns 6y ago
What's the state of the art with the next generation of JS frameworks, namely the ones without virtual DOM, such as svelte? My feeling since a few years is that this is where the new things happen (This impression is based on poor performance with more then 1000 reactive elements in VueJs2).
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Is the problem in your case Vue, or the fact you have 1000 reactive elements? Haven't heard anything about Svelte in months / years, although usage is steadily increasing (https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=svelte&from=2017-11-11&to=2020-11-11 https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=svelte&from=2017-11...).
  - swyx 6y ago
    if you ever want to check out whats the latest on svelte, i help run Svelte Society, the official-ish community org around Svelte: - https://twitter.com/SvelteSociety https://twitter.com/SvelteSociety - https://youtube.com/sveltesociety https://youtube.com/sveltesociety
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    In addition to links in sibling comments, there's the official Svelte blog with regular updates: https://svelte.dev/blog https://svelte.dev/blog and this video from recent conference on the future of Svelte: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSfdtmcZ4d0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSfdtmcZ4d0
- jraedisch 6y ago
  And also Web Assembly with the chance of sharing code between backend and frontend in other languages than JS.
- mgechev 6y ago
  Just a heads up. Angular does not use virtual DOM to reduce memory overhead. At build time, in Angular we've been generating instructions for efficient rendering and change detection since the early versions of the framework.
radiKal07 6y ago
No mention of AngularDart, is it still alive?
- romanovcode 6y ago
  Hopefully not
- mhoad 6y ago
  I wish AngularDart got some more love while it still had a chance. In fact I would say that about Dart in general. It's actually an incredibly nice language. It's easy to pick up, it runs literally everywhere, it's fast, it has good tooling, it's sane, it's super productive and it's quite actively developed. AngularDart could have actually become so much bigger than it ever was and while it isn't in any danger of actually dying it may as well be since Google have made it clear that due to the lack of interest they are just going to more or less treat it like an internal framework. I looked at it as a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. It's actually an incredibly mature and rock solid framework but they never seemed to invest much into even the basics of documentation. It was a total non-starter for newbies and never had a chance to get a lot of traction. If they had a proper budget put aside for dev-rel I feel that could have been a totally different story with a very different ending.
geewee 6y ago
I've recently had to use Angular for some time after using React for years. It's.. been unpleasant. A few of my pain points. - Observables. I'm actually okay with observables, but it seems like Angular has tried to ride on both horses when it comes to observables. E.g. the `HttpClient` returns an Observable, but you can't get your input as Observables, so you have to do weird lifecycle workarounds to get observables re-computed as your input changes - No fragments. Each component always creates it's own HTML tag. This makes stuff like having components inside tables really difficult to get right. - The reactive forms has been untyped for years. It feels weird to ship with a forms module that seems to work pretty well, heavily invest on typescript, and then the forms are simply `any` - I mean what the hell? - The input/output model is unfortunately much worse than it is in React. It doesn't seem like it, but the moment you want to create a HOC, or you want to wrap a component in another component, you find out that you have to manually specify all the input/output of the component you have to wrap. Nesting components is so inconvenient that your components become much larger than you want them to.
- renke1 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with basically everything you said. Reactive Forms are really great in general, but not being strongly typed is really a shame. I am aware though that it's not easy to actually make it strongly typed for various reasons. For a component-based framework, it's way too tedious in Angular to actually create components. Too often I create big components because I can't bring myself to split it into smaller components. In React it is so natural to create components you can do it even while you develop a feature (without it being overhead). I hardly do that in Angular because it's just too much work.
  - geewee 6y ago
    Yes I think the Reactive Forms work really well for the most part, and the type-safety is such a shame. I agree 100% with the big components. I can literally feel myself thinking "I should split this up.. but it's so much work" - where there's just much less friction doing that in React.
- strombofulous 6y ago
intellix 6y ago
Been using Angular.js and 2+ exclusively for almost a decade now. Keep reading how the compiler allows static type checking and superior tree-shaking at build time but I'm just not seeing any sort of fruition after years of promises. Every ngconf there's talk of the magical 2kb hello-world and bundle improvements with every major, yet the only bundles getting reductions are the hello-worlds and monster projects. It seems we're in the medium bundle category and it's just disappointing that every version our bundle size hasn't moved or increased slightly. We're currently at 2mb main/vendor after spending A LOT of time optimising and making everything lazy and then a team of 1 at our sister company release a Next.JS/React app with a main bundle about 1.3mb than ours using zero effort. There's never anything obvious when it comes to analysing the bundle and it seems we're using everything we need: Angular, Material, RxJS, ApolloClient. Most of our forms use Formly (huge savings from repeated HTML) All of our competitors are running React and have bundles about 1mb smaller than ours. Every year I install the VSC Language Service plugin and have to disable it the same day due to it continuously crashing and killing the editor so it seems we'll never get to benefit from that. Then I see a continuous stream of core developers leaving the Angular project due to toxic behaviour from Igor and it feels hopeless and depressing. The one saving grace is that the entire ecosystem is written in TypeScript and it's nice seeing everything typed to perfection.
- adamnemecek 6y ago
  What sort of toxic behavior?
  - intellix 6y ago
    There's this from Jeff and then countless "metoo" tweets about it: https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the-angular-team-and-community-5367934a16c9 https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the-angular-t...
- mgechev 6y ago
  Angular team member here :) >our bundle size hasn't moved or increased slightly Please make sure you are using the latest version of our compiler and runtime. Many developers observed significant improvements after the v9 release. Here's just one [example](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260864). >Every ngconf there's talk of the magical 2kb hello-world Currently, it's absolutely doable to get very small bundle size (<7-8KB) for a hello-world application. This, however, relies on private APIs. We haven't made them public yet, because not many folks are building hello world apps, but in the future we'll be exploring how to reduce the footprints of the framework even further for smaller apps. >We're currently at 2mb main/vendor after spending A LOT of time optimising and making everything lazy It is shocking for me that you're spending that much effort on optimizing your app, but you can't get your bundle below 2MB. I'm spending large chunk of my time looking into apps and thinking how to make them smaller & faster. I'll be more than happy to connect and brainstorm the same for your case. Please reach out to me on my hackernews username @google.com >Every year I install the VSC Language Service plugin and have to disable it the same day due to it continuously crashing and killing the editor so it seems we'll never get to benefit from that. Sorry to hear you had such an experience with the language service. If it keeps crashing, definitely report the problem here https://github.com/angular/angular/issues https://github.com/angular/angular/issues. We'll be very thankful if you share reproduction steps. >Then I see a continuous stream of core developers leaving the Angular project due to toxic behaviour from Igor and it feels hopeless and depressing. Folks leave and and others join. I can't comment on my co-workers experiences, but after 2 years working on Angular I haven't experienced any of the behavior you're referring to. >The one saving grace is that the entire ecosystem is written in TypeScript and it's nice seeing everything typed to perfection. Oh, I wish everything was that perfectly typed :). This is something the team and the community is constantly working on, but we still have a long way to go until we reach perfection.
villgax 6y ago
I just went back to plain JS & jQuery for all of my front-end work. None of my clients are bothered. Frameworks maybe make more sense from an organisation perspective of having to create the same thing in different variations but for sheer simplicity & understanding of what's actually happening plain JS/jQuery seems like a breath of fresh air.
- rgbrenner 6y ago
  Why jquery though? Is it even being maintained anymore? You know you can use vuejs on a single page.. just add it like you would jquery.. much nicer if you’re going to go that route.
  - ijidak 6y ago
    > Why jquery though? Is it even being maintained anymore? I see they're pushing one release a year. Last release was in April/May. I hope it's being maintained. At this point, I view jQuery as a foundational library. I know newer versions of HTML and browser APIs are replacing some of the need for jQuery. But its ergonomics are universally understood. For me that's as important as the APIs themselves. And I don't trust browser vendors to maintain uniformity long-term. Too many egos involved. I hope jQuery never dies.
  - cheschire 6y ago
    As long as jquery keeps getting pushed in the default .NET templates, it will keep living.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  I spent a LOT of time staring at Angular trying to figure out what problem it was actually supposed to be solving and finally gave up. If it actually does something useful, it's beyond my comprehension.
  - ozim 6y ago
    Did you ever had to manage or lead team of 5 to 10 developers? Have you seen web application implemented in MVC+jQuery where each page was developed by different person and everyone was just making their own approach. Then when something was to be fixed and other person was taking over he was introducing his own ideas to code already written by someone else. That is what angular solves for me, I don't have to spend time introducing new person to the project structure. I don't have to argue with "I know better juniors", I don't have to deal with condescending seniors "who wrote it that way it is total mess". Maybe you have seen some project handover to different team or you got project inherited from someone. It will be a lot easier to understand if that other team speaks "angular". I don't say code is perfect, you can still write total mess with it, but having angular saves a lot of digging into some insane monstrosities that I have seen in jQuery. In the end you might never need it, because everyone has different requirements and different projects.
sgt 6y ago
Angular 11? I was checking out Angular 2 just the other day! (At least that is how it feels).
- 0xcde4c3db 6y ago
  In case anyone else doesn't really follow web dev and was genuinely a bit shocked by seeing major version 11 of Angular, it's because they do a major release every 6 months, but just increment the major version number (cf. Firefox or Chrome) rather than using year/month version numbers (cf. Ubuntu) or incrementing the minor number (cf. OpenBSD). With respect to "Angular 2", there's probably a comparison to be made here with Linux 5.x effectively being Linux 2.6.$BIGNUM; as far as I know, Linux major version bumps don't indicate anything more than a threshold of Linus's discontent at how much unsung change has accumulated since the last bump.
troughway 6y ago
To the people who are saying how Angular isn't used much anymore by your company/projects, question: What FE tech would your company use nowadays for new projects? What would you use nowadays for new projects?
- ng12 6y ago
  It's become increasingly difficult to argue against React+TypeScript. One strong indicator is that we have a framework agnostic tech process where the candidate can pick whichever stack they like. The best candidates almost always pick React with Vue being a significant minority.
  - randompwd 6y ago
    > The best candidates almost always pick React I'm sure the worst candidates almost always pick React too, and some of the mediocre ones. People are just picking what they're most familiar with and that which is simpler to complete your task.
    - ng12 6y ago
      Sure but I'm not really interested in the negatives. I want to hire good engineers, and those engineers want to use React.
- christophilus 6y ago
  React/Preact with TypeScript is hard to beat.
- z5h 6y ago
  I've used Elm in a few commercial settings, and for personal work for several years. No problems I can't tolerate or work around.
burtonator 6y ago
The ship has sailed on Angular IMO ... React just nailed it and I say that as a person who REALLY dislikes Facebook as a company. The React team at Facebook has their act together and does a great job. The new Facebook redesign with chunks is really amazing. React hooks I think as they are currently designed is an anti-pattern because of the way they're too 'magic' and can bust the cache accidentally and cause performance bugs but conversely can cause data loss bugs because your code doesn't properly use hooks. Bad use of an API should yield compilation errors (in Typescript) NOT cause all sort of runtime errors with caching.
- umvi 6y ago
  Angular's fatal mistake was the name change around Angular 2 ("Don't call it 'Angular 2', just call it 'Angular'"). The problem is that Angular 1 is VERY different from Angular 2+ and searching "Angular" gave Angular 1 results... the search index of Google was poisoned for so long with the wrong results that I switched to React out of frustration.
  - hnrodey 6y ago
    google: angular http post call -angularjs
  - bob1029 6y ago
    The transition from Angular 1=>2 made it clear to us that this was not a good framework to use for long-term projects. We moved to RiotJS which was a breath of fresh air... for a little while. Then the same problems started plaguing that project in terms of major breaking changes so we hopped ship again. Now, we are on top of Blazor using server-side rendering. Our hopes are that by taking up allegiance with Microsoft that we can ward off horrific breaking changes for a few years and actually build something valuable during that time. Blazor is particularly appealing to use because we were able to completely define our UI state machines in C# classes that can be tested in perfect isolation from any client/browser interaction. We can also directly inject & reuse our existing business services without needing to develop any JSON APIs or other wasteful boilerplate.
  - 6y ago
neves 6y ago
Is there really any difference between these mature and well funded projects like Angular and React? Sure, one will have some better features than the other, but it looks like they always catch up. I believe you must choose one based in the knowledge and experience of your team. There isn't really a real technological reason to choose one. In the long term, they all look the same.
The_rationalist 6y ago
I really wanted to like Angular but their Vdom is inherently flawed, here's why: In Vue when a component has changes (e.g the user click or input something in the component), the reactivity autodetection mechanism will trigger changes on the component and its children/descendants. Angular instead by using zone.js will trigger all the things that Vue rightfully trigger but they will trigger all of the component ancestors too! Up to the root! This means two things: You can't debug this mess as any method in the template or onchanges hook in the ancestors will be triggered and console.log() so the Devtools are flooded with unrelated changes. If you call a store on the template the store debugger will be flooded too. And all those calls affect performance dramatically which is pure unwanted nonsense. This non Scoped reactivity might have usefulness for 0.1% of cases (or for 0%?) but even at best, it should be totally opt-in. But the situation is worse, you cannot opt out. Or you can, with changedetection.onpush which disable any reactivity (you must manually trigger it in 2020, can you imagine?) This nonsense made us stay on Vue and everybody in it's right mind should avoid Angular until this fundamental issue is fixed. https://medium.com/@vyaron/point-of-vue-part-2-facing-angular-e4e9ee65161d https://medium.com/@vyaron/point-of-vue-part-2-facing-angula... Unrelated: the second huge limitation of angular is that it has no official devtool integration and that the community devtool is mostly unmaintained and doesn't work on angular > 9
- sod 6y ago
  My recommendation: Remove zone.js, run angular in NoZone mode and use ngrx. Thats how we do it. Gets rid of all the headaches zone.js introduces, is way more predictable, build is smaller and just updates the components where data changes. And you can see your state in the redux devtools.
  - The_rationalist 6y ago
    1) handling local component state in a store seems terrible. And the Redux devtool will be flooded with commands that are from local and global state access making both indistinguishable and therefore undebuggable. 2) ngrx seems like overengineering^10 and you have more flexibility and much less cognitive load by using Mobx with Angular.
janci 6y ago
This opinion will be unpopular, but I still stick to AngularJS. It's mature and complete, does not introduce breaking changes every day, super-easy to start prototyping without tooling yet can work well with build system. I use it with TypeScript and only things I am missing are hot reloading and typed templates. The performance is not top but usually not limiting. Namespace clash is not really a problem if you qualify your component names. Forget all the $scope, controllers and services are just plain JS classes. Every time I see React had got shiny new pattern that breaks everything you have done so far or Angular is 4 major versions ahead of when I last checked and still not solving the architecture inconsistencies I'm glad I stayed with AngularJS.
kabes 6y ago
Did angular for years and hope I'll never have to use it again. I actually even prefer component-based angularjs than the heavily overengineered bloat that is angular.

152 points by amitport 6y ago

The comments here are mostly about framework clannism. Every framework has it's pros, cons, compromises, and quirks. I picked Angular because it was so advanced. I wanted the challenge, got to work on awesome teams, and learned so much. I'm a better developer today because of it. Thanks, Angular!

vyrotek 6y ago

Congrats to the team! Definitely still loving how productive our small dev team can be using Angular. Sometimes the "batteries included" approach approach gets a bad rap but I really enjoy it.

beeman 6y ago
Same here! And folks should not be fooled that we are the only ones. We started a new Angular Community on Discord a few months back and we are already +3500 members and counting! There are interesting discussions daily! Come join us at https://discord.gg/angular https://discord.gg/angular

amitport 6y ago

Changelogs: https://www.github.com/angular/angular/tree/master/CHANGELOG.md https://www.github.com/angular/angular/tree/master/CHANGELOG... https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases/tag/v11.0.0 https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases/tag/v11.0.0 https://github.com/angular/components/releases/tag/11.0.0 https://github.com/angular/components/releases/tag/11.0.0

llimos 6y ago

I feel like Angular is now where jQuery was a few years ago - used to be huge but no-one is starting new projects in it unless they have to, and they keep releasing new versions for the large existing base. The actual updates here are a bit meh tbh.

__ryan__ 6y ago
Citation needed.
- DJBunnies 6y ago
  They clearly said feel, not fact.
- llimos 6y ago
  https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/ https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/ Look at awareness vs. interest. Lots of people know about it but most of them don't want to use it.
k__ 6y ago
While I personally prefer React 90% of the time, I would say with its deep RxJS integration Angular has its merits. Sure, it's miles away from Cycle.js, but Angular has a much bigger eco-system. If I would create a (realtime) data intensive app, I would probably use Angular for it.
- josteink 6y ago
  > I would say with its deep RxJS integration Angular has its merits That’s funny, because for the exact same reason I’ve taken a strong dislike on it. The rest of NodeJS flows on promises and constantly have to switch between that, and having to use different APIs, and no longer be able to write simple awaitable async code... It drove me mad. Angular without RxJS would be so much better.
  - k__ 6y ago
    Doesn't Node.js mainly flow on callbacks? As far as my experience goes, promises require some extra work too.
  - tashoecraft 6y ago
    Strongly disagree. Rxjs is such a better async pattern than anything else in the javascript ecosystem. The front end shouldn't care what node is doing, especially since not everyone's front end uses node. What I don't like about async await is it changes the pattern you are seeing, intermingling synchronous and asynchronous code based on the correct placement of a keyword, then using try catch blocks to catch errors are just so ugly. Passing my data through a stream of pure functions that transform the data into what I need just feels pleasant to work with, but I do agree it takes awhile to be proficient in it.

_the_inflator 6y ago

Congratulations, Angular team! Looking forward to Webpack 5 integration. A mature framework to develop enterprise applications.

brodo 6y ago

Version 11? Last time I checked they where at 4. Are they using semantic versioning? If yes, that many major versions is a red flag.

255kb 6y ago
Tell that to Java or Nodejs :D
- jmisavage 6y ago
  True. Node is an interesting one since the odd number releases are for more for testing new features while the even numbered ones are the stable/lts builds. Odd numbered releases are become EOL as soon as the next major release is out. I always try to tell the devs I work with to stick to the even numbered ones because of that.
- lolive 6y ago
  For Java, it’s easy: - v8: we added functions and streams. It basically changes everything. We also added asynchronous stuff but you don’t care yet. - v11: we added built-in async http. Now you really want to have a look at that asynchronous stuff from v8. And that’s pretty much it.
  - lolive 6y ago
    By the way, we are at Java15 at the moment. And don’t ask me what happened in seasons 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 and 15. Like grey’s anatomy, nobody knows and nobody cares.
    - The_rationalist 6y ago
      Only mediocre developers don't care about mastering their tool, but it seems that such mediocrity is quite institutionalized in the Java ecosystem. Java is evolving very quickly and will soon have e.g pattern matching.
      - 6y ago

Alir3z4 6y ago

This is lovely. Webpack 5 and its persistent disk cache. Much cleaner build reporting. It has been always annoying to keep an eye on them hidden and shuffled in the build log. Inlining fonts, yesssss. Excellent work. Seeing ngcc speed improvement even by 1% is great where it seems to be up to 4x speedup. We have bit Angular code base and smaller ones and every single of Angular features in this release is helpful regardless of the size of the code base. Thank you Angular and everyone involved <3

ktpsns 6y ago

What's the state of the art with the next generation of JS frameworks, namely the ones without virtual DOM, such as svelte? My feeling since a few years is that this is where the new things happen (This impression is based on poor performance with more then 1000 reactive elements in VueJs2).

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Is the problem in your case Vue, or the fact you have 1000 reactive elements? Haven't heard anything about Svelte in months / years, although usage is steadily increasing (https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=svelte&from=2017-11-11&to=2020-11-11 https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=svelte&from=2017-11...).
- swyx 6y ago
  if you ever want to check out whats the latest on svelte, i help run Svelte Society, the official-ish community org around Svelte: - https://twitter.com/SvelteSociety https://twitter.com/SvelteSociety - https://youtube.com/sveltesociety https://youtube.com/sveltesociety
- dmitriid 6y ago
  In addition to links in sibling comments, there's the official Svelte blog with regular updates: https://svelte.dev/blog https://svelte.dev/blog and this video from recent conference on the future of Svelte: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSfdtmcZ4d0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSfdtmcZ4d0
jraedisch 6y ago
And also Web Assembly with the chance of sharing code between backend and frontend in other languages than JS.
mgechev 6y ago
Just a heads up. Angular does not use virtual DOM to reduce memory overhead. At build time, in Angular we've been generating instructions for efficient rendering and change detection since the early versions of the framework.

radiKal07 6y ago

No mention of AngularDart, is it still alive?

romanovcode 6y ago
Hopefully not
mhoad 6y ago
I wish AngularDart got some more love while it still had a chance. In fact I would say that about Dart in general. It's actually an incredibly nice language. It's easy to pick up, it runs literally everywhere, it's fast, it has good tooling, it's sane, it's super productive and it's quite actively developed. AngularDart could have actually become so much bigger than it ever was and while it isn't in any danger of actually dying it may as well be since Google have made it clear that due to the lack of interest they are just going to more or less treat it like an internal framework. I looked at it as a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. It's actually an incredibly mature and rock solid framework but they never seemed to invest much into even the basics of documentation. It was a total non-starter for newbies and never had a chance to get a lot of traction. If they had a proper budget put aside for dev-rel I feel that could have been a totally different story with a very different ending.

geewee 6y ago

I've recently had to use Angular for some time after using React for years. It's.. been unpleasant. A few of my pain points. - Observables. I'm actually okay with observables, but it seems like Angular has tried to ride on both horses when it comes to observables. E.g. the `HttpClient` returns an Observable, but you can't get your input as Observables, so you have to do weird lifecycle workarounds to get observables re-computed as your input changes - No fragments. Each component always creates it's own HTML tag. This makes stuff like having components inside tables really difficult to get right. - The reactive forms has been untyped for years. It feels weird to ship with a forms module that seems to work pretty well, heavily invest on typescript, and then the forms are simply `any` - I mean what the hell? - The input/output model is unfortunately much worse than it is in React. It doesn't seem like it, but the moment you want to create a HOC, or you want to wrap a component in another component, you find out that you have to manually specify all the input/output of the component you have to wrap. Nesting components is so inconvenient that your components become much larger than you want them to.

renke1 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with basically everything you said. Reactive Forms are really great in general, but not being strongly typed is really a shame. I am aware though that it's not easy to actually make it strongly typed for various reasons. For a component-based framework, it's way too tedious in Angular to actually create components. Too often I create big components because I can't bring myself to split it into smaller components. In React it is so natural to create components you can do it even while you develop a feature (without it being overhead). I hardly do that in Angular because it's just too much work.
- geewee 6y ago
  Yes I think the Reactive Forms work really well for the most part, and the type-safety is such a shame. I agree 100% with the big components. I can literally feel myself thinking "I should split this up.. but it's so much work" - where there's just much less friction doing that in React.
strombofulous 6y ago

intellix 6y ago

Been using Angular.js and 2+ exclusively for almost a decade now. Keep reading how the compiler allows static type checking and superior tree-shaking at build time but I'm just not seeing any sort of fruition after years of promises. Every ngconf there's talk of the magical 2kb hello-world and bundle improvements with every major, yet the only bundles getting reductions are the hello-worlds and monster projects. It seems we're in the medium bundle category and it's just disappointing that every version our bundle size hasn't moved or increased slightly. We're currently at 2mb main/vendor after spending A LOT of time optimising and making everything lazy and then a team of 1 at our sister company release a Next.JS/React app with a main bundle about 1.3mb than ours using zero effort. There's never anything obvious when it comes to analysing the bundle and it seems we're using everything we need: Angular, Material, RxJS, ApolloClient. Most of our forms use Formly (huge savings from repeated HTML) All of our competitors are running React and have bundles about 1mb smaller than ours. Every year I install the VSC Language Service plugin and have to disable it the same day due to it continuously crashing and killing the editor so it seems we'll never get to benefit from that. Then I see a continuous stream of core developers leaving the Angular project due to toxic behaviour from Igor and it feels hopeless and depressing. The one saving grace is that the entire ecosystem is written in TypeScript and it's nice seeing everything typed to perfection.

adamnemecek 6y ago
What sort of toxic behavior?
- intellix 6y ago
  There's this from Jeff and then countless "metoo" tweets about it: https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the-angular-team-and-community-5367934a16c9 https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the-angular-t...
mgechev 6y ago
Angular team member here :) >our bundle size hasn't moved or increased slightly Please make sure you are using the latest version of our compiler and runtime. Many developers observed significant improvements after the v9 release. Here's just one [example](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260864). >Every ngconf there's talk of the magical 2kb hello-world Currently, it's absolutely doable to get very small bundle size (<7-8KB) for a hello-world application. This, however, relies on private APIs. We haven't made them public yet, because not many folks are building hello world apps, but in the future we'll be exploring how to reduce the footprints of the framework even further for smaller apps. >We're currently at 2mb main/vendor after spending A LOT of time optimising and making everything lazy It is shocking for me that you're spending that much effort on optimizing your app, but you can't get your bundle below 2MB. I'm spending large chunk of my time looking into apps and thinking how to make them smaller & faster. I'll be more than happy to connect and brainstorm the same for your case. Please reach out to me on my hackernews username @google.com >Every year I install the VSC Language Service plugin and have to disable it the same day due to it continuously crashing and killing the editor so it seems we'll never get to benefit from that. Sorry to hear you had such an experience with the language service. If it keeps crashing, definitely report the problem here https://github.com/angular/angular/issues https://github.com/angular/angular/issues. We'll be very thankful if you share reproduction steps. >Then I see a continuous stream of core developers leaving the Angular project due to toxic behaviour from Igor and it feels hopeless and depressing. Folks leave and and others join. I can't comment on my co-workers experiences, but after 2 years working on Angular I haven't experienced any of the behavior you're referring to. >The one saving grace is that the entire ecosystem is written in TypeScript and it's nice seeing everything typed to perfection. Oh, I wish everything was that perfectly typed :). This is something the team and the community is constantly working on, but we still have a long way to go until we reach perfection.

villgax 6y ago

I just went back to plain JS & jQuery for all of my front-end work. None of my clients are bothered. Frameworks maybe make more sense from an organisation perspective of having to create the same thing in different variations but for sheer simplicity & understanding of what's actually happening plain JS/jQuery seems like a breath of fresh air.

rgbrenner 6y ago
Why jquery though? Is it even being maintained anymore? You know you can use vuejs on a single page.. just add it like you would jquery.. much nicer if you’re going to go that route.
- ijidak 6y ago
  > Why jquery though? Is it even being maintained anymore? I see they're pushing one release a year. Last release was in April/May. I hope it's being maintained. At this point, I view jQuery as a foundational library. I know newer versions of HTML and browser APIs are replacing some of the need for jQuery. But its ergonomics are universally understood. For me that's as important as the APIs themselves. And I don't trust browser vendors to maintain uniformity long-term. Too many egos involved. I hope jQuery never dies.
- cheschire 6y ago
  As long as jquery keeps getting pushed in the default .NET templates, it will keep living.
commandlinefan 6y ago
I spent a LOT of time staring at Angular trying to figure out what problem it was actually supposed to be solving and finally gave up. If it actually does something useful, it's beyond my comprehension.
- ozim 6y ago
  Did you ever had to manage or lead team of 5 to 10 developers? Have you seen web application implemented in MVC+jQuery where each page was developed by different person and everyone was just making their own approach. Then when something was to be fixed and other person was taking over he was introducing his own ideas to code already written by someone else. That is what angular solves for me, I don't have to spend time introducing new person to the project structure. I don't have to argue with "I know better juniors", I don't have to deal with condescending seniors "who wrote it that way it is total mess". Maybe you have seen some project handover to different team or you got project inherited from someone. It will be a lot easier to understand if that other team speaks "angular". I don't say code is perfect, you can still write total mess with it, but having angular saves a lot of digging into some insane monstrosities that I have seen in jQuery. In the end you might never need it, because everyone has different requirements and different projects.

sgt 6y ago

Angular 11? I was checking out Angular 2 just the other day! (At least that is how it feels).

0xcde4c3db 6y ago
In case anyone else doesn't really follow web dev and was genuinely a bit shocked by seeing major version 11 of Angular, it's because they do a major release every 6 months, but just increment the major version number (cf. Firefox or Chrome) rather than using year/month version numbers (cf. Ubuntu) or incrementing the minor number (cf. OpenBSD). With respect to "Angular 2", there's probably a comparison to be made here with Linux 5.x effectively being Linux 2.6.$BIGNUM; as far as I know, Linux major version bumps don't indicate anything more than a threshold of Linus's discontent at how much unsung change has accumulated since the last bump.

troughway 6y ago

To the people who are saying how Angular isn't used much anymore by your company/projects, question: What FE tech would your company use nowadays for new projects? What would you use nowadays for new projects?

ng12 6y ago
It's become increasingly difficult to argue against React+TypeScript. One strong indicator is that we have a framework agnostic tech process where the candidate can pick whichever stack they like. The best candidates almost always pick React with Vue being a significant minority.
- randompwd 6y ago
  > The best candidates almost always pick React I'm sure the worst candidates almost always pick React too, and some of the mediocre ones. People are just picking what they're most familiar with and that which is simpler to complete your task.
  - ng12 6y ago
    Sure but I'm not really interested in the negatives. I want to hire good engineers, and those engineers want to use React.
christophilus 6y ago
React/Preact with TypeScript is hard to beat.
z5h 6y ago
I've used Elm in a few commercial settings, and for personal work for several years. No problems I can't tolerate or work around.

burtonator 6y ago

The ship has sailed on Angular IMO ... React just nailed it and I say that as a person who REALLY dislikes Facebook as a company. The React team at Facebook has their act together and does a great job. The new Facebook redesign with chunks is really amazing. React hooks I think as they are currently designed is an anti-pattern because of the way they're too 'magic' and can bust the cache accidentally and cause performance bugs but conversely can cause data loss bugs because your code doesn't properly use hooks. Bad use of an API should yield compilation errors (in Typescript) NOT cause all sort of runtime errors with caching.

umvi 6y ago
Angular's fatal mistake was the name change around Angular 2 ("Don't call it 'Angular 2', just call it 'Angular'"). The problem is that Angular 1 is VERY different from Angular 2+ and searching "Angular" gave Angular 1 results... the search index of Google was poisoned for so long with the wrong results that I switched to React out of frustration.
- hnrodey 6y ago
  google: angular http post call -angularjs
- bob1029 6y ago
  The transition from Angular 1=>2 made it clear to us that this was not a good framework to use for long-term projects. We moved to RiotJS which was a breath of fresh air... for a little while. Then the same problems started plaguing that project in terms of major breaking changes so we hopped ship again. Now, we are on top of Blazor using server-side rendering. Our hopes are that by taking up allegiance with Microsoft that we can ward off horrific breaking changes for a few years and actually build something valuable during that time. Blazor is particularly appealing to use because we were able to completely define our UI state machines in C# classes that can be tested in perfect isolation from any client/browser interaction. We can also directly inject & reuse our existing business services without needing to develop any JSON APIs or other wasteful boilerplate.
- 6y ago

neves 6y ago

Is there really any difference between these mature and well funded projects like Angular and React? Sure, one will have some better features than the other, but it looks like they always catch up. I believe you must choose one based in the knowledge and experience of your team. There isn't really a real technological reason to choose one. In the long term, they all look the same.

The_rationalist 6y ago

I really wanted to like Angular but their Vdom is inherently flawed, here's why: In Vue when a component has changes (e.g the user click or input something in the component), the reactivity autodetection mechanism will trigger changes on the component and its children/descendants. Angular instead by using zone.js will trigger all the things that Vue rightfully trigger but they will trigger all of the component ancestors too! Up to the root! This means two things: You can't debug this mess as any method in the template or onchanges hook in the ancestors will be triggered and console.log() so the Devtools are flooded with unrelated changes. If you call a store on the template the store debugger will be flooded too. And all those calls affect performance dramatically which is pure unwanted nonsense. This non Scoped reactivity might have usefulness for 0.1% of cases (or for 0%?) but even at best, it should be totally opt-in. But the situation is worse, you cannot opt out. Or you can, with changedetection.onpush which disable any reactivity (you must manually trigger it in 2020, can you imagine?) This nonsense made us stay on Vue and everybody in it's right mind should avoid Angular until this fundamental issue is fixed. https://medium.com/@vyaron/point-of-vue-part-2-facing-angular-e4e9ee65161d https://medium.com/@vyaron/point-of-vue-part-2-facing-angula... Unrelated: the second huge limitation of angular is that it has no official devtool integration and that the community devtool is mostly unmaintained and doesn't work on angular > 9

sod 6y ago
My recommendation: Remove zone.js, run angular in NoZone mode and use ngrx. Thats how we do it. Gets rid of all the headaches zone.js introduces, is way more predictable, build is smaller and just updates the components where data changes. And you can see your state in the redux devtools.
- The_rationalist 6y ago
  1) handling local component state in a store seems terrible. And the Redux devtool will be flooded with commands that are from local and global state access making both indistinguishable and therefore undebuggable. 2) ngrx seems like overengineering^10 and you have more flexibility and much less cognitive load by using Mobx with Angular.

janci 6y ago

This opinion will be unpopular, but I still stick to AngularJS. It's mature and complete, does not introduce breaking changes every day, super-easy to start prototyping without tooling yet can work well with build system. I use it with TypeScript and only things I am missing are hot reloading and typed templates. The performance is not top but usually not limiting. Namespace clash is not really a problem if you qualify your component names. Forget all the $scope, controllers and services are just plain JS classes. Every time I see React had got shiny new pattern that breaks everything you have done so far or Angular is 4 major versions ahead of when I last checked and still not solving the architecture inconsistencies I'm glad I stayed with AngularJS.

kabes 6y ago

Did angular for years and hope I'll never have to use it again. I actually even prefer component-based angularjs than the heavily overengineered bloat that is angular.