Important new features. But in my opinion too little, too late. To me it feels like Angular is slowly dying. No idea though, why so many companies still use it for new projects.
> No idea though, why so many companies still use it for new projects.
If I had to guess, it has a mature ecosystem, it is still actively developed, and it has already been "battle tested" by various companies. Angular is a "boring" choice, and some people prefer to stick with boring solutions than exciting, new solutions.
It seems the alternatives are trying to catch up to Angular. The entire react ecosystem's embrace of Next is proof that people want a framework and not "just a library" for a lot of their needs.
I prefer Angular as I much prefer spending my time building rather than wading through open source bs finding what works, what plays nice together, what others are using. Version management is as simple as "ng update".
People always say angular comes with „batteries included“, but honestly I don’t get it. If you take vite, vitest, react, react-router, react-hooks-forms, react-i18next and axios you have more or less all the angular features covered. You don’t have to „dig through bullshit“ to do that.
Unless sarcasm, your comment actually explains the part you don’t get quite well. If you pick React for a project, how do you know to pick the other 6 dependencies you listed?
No, it’s not sarcasm, just install the listed dependencies and you are good to go.
For forms and validation you can use the mentioned react-hooks-forms. MUCH easier compared to reactive forms.
I never understood the benefit of angular dependency injection, because of its very limited singleton only approach.
React-i18next is just so much better than all the i18n solutions for angular. If you want to be able to switch the language on the fly, you anyway need something like transloco for angular.
Pipes are just functions for templates, no need with jsx. And directives can be replaced with composition. Much easier and powerful.
Angular material is really dated, look&feel is from 10 years ago, check out the current material guide, and compare it to angular material. And it’s just way too hard to customize it, and it doesn’t come with a lot of features. And technically it’s not a part of angular. There are a few good commercial angular UI libraries though.
I don’t think you understand. For someone who isn’t familiar with the React ecosystem - how would they know to install any of your mentioned dependencies.
Forget which solution is better, apparently there is a subset of users who choose Angular purely because they want features built in & not to go searching for additional dependencies.
My experience with libraries built by the community. Libraries for react have much higher quality than angular libraries. I usually fix the hard bugs in our team, and therefore read a lot of library code on GitHub. Usually react libraries impress me and angular libraries are often rather underwhelming. Highly subjective opinion though.
I don't have much experience outside of Angular ecosystem, but I share this sentiment too - the framework might be good, but the community size and quality also matter a lot. A similar example would be Sublime Text vs VSCode - I use the former, but VSCode has so much more vibrant community and everything supports VSCode by default, unlike ST where you are lucky to get a half-working prototype.
First of all, if you want to compare actual growth, you'll need a logarithmic scale. Second, if you add in alternatives like Vue.js, you'll realize React dwarfs both Angular and Vue.js, yet I don't see anyone on HN claiming "Vue is dying".
I agree. To answer your question it's really just companies sticking with what they know. Just like how a huge portion of the internet is still built on PHP.
> The number of people wanting to keep using Angular has been falling for years. But they are forced to by some external control.
Exactly my experience. I often ask why angular was chosen for the task, and usually the answer is: because the architect put it on the slides, and because we hire angular developers.
Agreed. Stewardship of the angular ecosystem is lacking. Versioning across first-party @angular packages isn’t consistent. Some @angular packages are in permanent beta for unknown reasons. Anything besides the latest release is abandonware.
And a lot of community libraries don’t work for new releases. Often they seem to need an update to work with the current angular version. React usually doesn’t have that problem. And because of their much smaller focus they only have major releases every 18 months or so.
