Seems like Angular has gotten better since v2 (my last experience).
Has anyone done a modern Angular vs. React comparison that's not an AI slop article?
I'm also curious if it's "simple made easy" for performant applications. React is arguably "simple made hard", but there are notable, highly performant applications written with it (Linear comes to mind).
I must admit, modern angular has been a pleasure to use. It's a shame that the ecosystem is a little rough. Luckily you get so much out of the box already.
I wish Angular dropped their weird compiler that's tight coupled to tsc and moved into more pluggable approach so you can use it with whatever TS compiler. App and unit test cold build times are still crap, but at least with a coding agent you care about this less.
Angular should ditch the compiler altogether - it really hinders them in so many ways, especially now with AI-codegen where tools have to specifically choose to do the work to integrate the Angular toolchain instead of using plain TypeScript and HTML.
Wow Angular Aria looks fantastic. Even have full docs for the more complicated scenarios like autocomplete. Can't wait to get this in my hands and see if it replaces the custom screen reader autocomplete I had to make.
Really excited for this. I've been dying to use signal-forms and resources since they were experimental. Once I got on the signal train, I could never go back and having to use RxJS for forms became a major pain point.
the biggest problem in angular is that it is so hard to use a custom toolchain, i.e. not their angular/cli product instead mix it with other stuff in lets say vite
Angular has made my programming career joy and it has not felt like work at all, all the best to angular dev team! Nothing better than getting to work with favorite language, learning better and getting paid :D
When I look at job postings and see "React" I go "ugh" these days and find myself looking for Angular instead. That's the complete opposite of my thoughts from just two years ago.
I would still rather use something else (instead or React or Angular) but 1) most jobs in my area are asking for one of those, and 2) I'm actually starting to lean towards Angular even for personal projects.
Angular is great these days, and they're making really nice improvements.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I go to: https://angular.dev/guide/aria/overview#showcase and try out the keyboard controls, somehow they've decided that those elements should be navigated with the arrow keys instead of much more commonly used tab and shift+tab? Even the tabs from their own documentation, right above that example, also uses tab/shift-tab for moving focus between them.
What kinds of features or workflows are you missing that Angular's CLI doesn't cover? Or is it just that you're used to Vite (or something else) and wish you could use that instead of Angular's own tooling?
I'm not on the Angular development team or anything, though I do use Angular at $DAY_JOB and I'm overall perfectly fine with the framework and its tooling. However, the grass might be greener elsewhere; I'm just not familiar with it!
Could you say more about signals? Is it are all analogous to, say, game engine signals paradigms (eg Godot) - components at any depth emit signals and any other component can subscribe? Or something totally different?
Signals are a privative data structure in Angular, hence core. Signal-based forms are part of the Forms module. You aren't using forms, you don't get the overhead.
A lot of those behaviors aren't their decisions, they're specs from the W3C[1]. The tab behavior may be an oversight though, the W3C page specifies subsequent tab presses should move the focus outside of the tab list, but it could also be an exception. I'm not an expert but sometimes there are exceptions made due to the realities that operating systems, browsers, and screen readers all have varying degrees of support for accessibility features. Accessibility is a very deep rabbit hole, which is why these kind of libraries are popular in the first place.
Yeah, sure, I'm well aware of that, it was more a reaction to parent saying that specifically the accessibility stuff looks amazing, but seems they haven't even nailed the basics yet, so I'm wondering where the amazing parts are.
With that said, the autocomplete example which parent mentioned, does seem well made. Was just surprising to see such a basic mistake in the documentation for the accessibility stuff, one would think they would take extra care to get it right there, as that's what people (and LLMs...) will read and retain.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of Angular v22. We continue to be proud of the work we do with each release. Our goal is to maintain a high quality stream of features and improvements that make the workflows for developers smooth no matter how they build Angular applications.
Angular is the solid foundation upon which you can build what’s next on the web. This release features updates across stability, ergonomics and more. We want Angular to be a sort of launch pad that you can use as you build your next great application.
There’s some great features to discuss, so let’s dive in.
Production Ready is the Name of the Game
On the Angular team, we take a lot of joy and pride in our ability to update our APIs to bring great new features to Angular. When bringing new features to the table, we typically release a feature as experimental or developer preview. This gives the team time to gather feedback and iterate on new features. During this time, features will undergo refinement with the intention of delivering the best possible version to the community. This is great except that it means some features will not be production ready even though developers are excited and ready to use them immediately. In this release, we’re excited to be bringing 3 significant Angular features to production-ready, stable status: Signal Forms, Angular Aria and the Asynchronous Reactivity APIs.
Signal Forms: Composable, Reactive and Ready to go
We designed Signal Forms to be the new, robust forms API. Signal forms combine the best parts of Reactive forms, the value of strongly typed forms, as well as the things developers love about template driven forms and reactivity of signals. We put all of that together to make a reactive, composable and declarative form solution. When we launched Signal Forms in v21, we received strong signals (pun intended) from teams inside and outside of Google that we were on the right track. Since then, we’ve updated Signal Forms by: