What's New in Angular 12

Angular 12 | May 2021

Angular version 12.0.0 was released on May 12, 2021. The Angular v12 major release is getting closer to "Ivy Everywhere". Angular's newest version is smaller, faster, and easier to use, and enables the transition of the Angular ecosystem to the Ivy compiler.

Angular v12 includes stylish improvements, nullish coalescing—allowing developers to write cleaner code in TypeScript and Angular templates. It also offers Webpack 5 support and TypeScript v4.2, plus a stick model enabled by default to help catch errors earlier in the development cycle.

The View Engine is deprecated and set for complete removal in a future release, but no worries! If your current libraries use the View Engine, it still works with Ivy apps.

Angular is improving the learning experience for developers with 'meaningful' changes to the documentation, including new types of guides for contributors, content, and guides and videos for error messages.

What's Ahead for Angular 12

Angular is Google’s TypeScript-based framework for building desktop and mobile web applications. It has over 68,000 stars on GitHub. Angular 11 launched on the 11th day of the 11th month of 2020.

Every year, Angular runs a developer survey with almost 30K responses to make Angular better. With the Angular community feedback, requests, and suggestions, they plan some timesaving, faster, and pretty cool improvements.

The Angular Roadmap Project's focus is a 'Zoneless Angular' making Zone.js options and ultimately provides more control to the developers.

Anticipated Features and Benefits of the Next Angular Release

Better Developer Ergonomics @angular/forms

Work is in progress for implementing stricter type checking for reactive forms. This allows developers to catch more issues during development time, enable better text editor and IDE support, and improve the type checking for reactive forms.

Leverage Full Framework Capabilities with Zone.js Opt-Out

Angular is going to design and implement a plan to make Zone.js optional from Angular applications. This simplifies the framework, improves debugging, and reduce application bundle size.

Reducing Framework Overheard by Removing Legacy

Angular plans remove the legacy View Engine for smaller Angular conceptual overhead, smaller package size, lower maintenance cost, and lower codebase complexity.

Improve Test Times and Automatic Test Environment Tear Down

By changing the TestBed to automatically clean up and tear down the test environment after each test run, developers can improve test time and create better isolation across tests.

Improve Build Performance With ngc as a tsc Plug-In Distribution

Distributing the Angular compiler as a plugin of the TypeScript compiler is forecasted to improve developers' build performance and substantially reduce maintenance costs.

Support Adding Directives to Host Elements

A long-standing feature request for the ability to add directives to host elements. The feature allows developers to augment their components with different behaviors without using inheritance.

Simplified Angular Mental Model with Optional NgModules

Future Angular editions make NgModules optional that simplifies the learning journey. This work allows developers to develop standalone components and implement an alternative API for declaring the component's compilation scope.

Ergonomic Component Level Code-Splitting APIs

A common problem of web applications is a slow initial load time. A way to improve it is to apply more granular code-splitting on a component level. Developing more ergonomic code-splitting APIs encourages this practice.

Wijmo has supported Angular since the very beginning with Angular 1 (AngularJS). We are committed to providing Angular developers a powerful toolset for building enterprise-grade applications.