Angular 9 Released with Ivy by default

February 7, the development team of Angular, a JavaScript application framework, released the latest major release Angular 9. There are numerous improvements, including ‘Ivy’ engine by default.

Angular is a framework for building JavaScript base applications. It supports implementation for web browser applications and also native applications.

Angular 9 is the major release following Angular 8, which was released in My 2019. As they call it “one of the biggest updates to Angular made in the past 3 years,” there are improvements added throughout the whole platform, including improvements on framework, Angular Material, and CLI (command-line tool).

One of the most notable changes is that the ‘Ivy’ engine, which was introduced as the preview version in Angular 8, is now the default compiler and runtime. There are a lot of improvements made on Ivy, including smaller bundle size, faster testing, better debugging, improved CSS class and style binding, and improved type checking. This brings about reducing the size of small apps by 30%, and for large apps by 25-40%.

There are other improvements besides Ivy. CLI has been changed so that the latest CLI will always be used, and ‘ng update’ command now shows clearer progress updates. Also, now it’s easier to debug during the update.

For the dependency injection feature, which uses ‘@injectable’ keywords, there are two new options, ‘platform’ and ‘any’.

For testing components, a new mechanism called ‘component harnesses’ is introduced. By abstracting away the implementation details, the reliability of unit test is improved. Most Angular Material components can be tested via component harnesses.

Also, with the Angular Language Service, an Angular extension of Visual Studio Marketplace, the architectural changes have improved the performance and stability.

Angular 9 is available on the project website.

Angular
https://angular.io/