Angular 8.0 Has Arrived: What to Expect and How to Upgrade?

Finally, Angular 8 is prepared to hit the market. But wait, Angular 7 will be available till April 2020, and it still serves your purpose, you may not need to upgrade to Angular 8 till then. But keeping the advantages and value additions in mind, you may consider upgrading to Angular 8. 

Let's have a look at the key-value additions that we come across with the new Angular 8.

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It's been an entire year since the Angular team is considering Ivy renderer which it is working upon. Though earlier also this has been discussed on several occasions, there hasn't been any official announcement so far. Finally, with Angular 8, app developers are delighted to have the Ivy renderer. 

The team behind the Angular 8 development just announced that Ivy is going to be introduced in the Angular 8 as an optional preview. The preview of this renderer will help developers to evaluate how well their earlier Angular applications really work or don't work. Ivy will particularly benefit from comparing the reduced file size of the Angular 8 apps compared to the Angular 7 apps.

Ivy is going to change many things in terms of comparing the performance of Angular apps. In complete contrast to the current Angular View Engine, Ivy offers a whole array of benefits including the below-mentioned.

Ivy is the renderer that makes understanding new Angular code much easier for humans.

Thanks to Ivy, you can expect faster Angular development time.

With Ivy, the payload size will decrease significantly, and this will boost the browser download speed.

Ivy will help you checking the template type better to detect development errors more efficiently so that users don't come across them during runtime.

Angular Ivy is also going to be fully compatible with all existing applications built with Angular. Thanks to this, the current apps are not needed to be changed.

In case of any unwanted errors, the Angular team will always extend their support to fix the issues and to address with needful changes for the app to become ready for Ivy.

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One major value addition with the Angular 8 is the enhanced support for bundling web workers along with Angular CLI. Since Web Workers is now considered a key and helpful aspect of front-end development to take care of all CPU intensive tasks, the new Angular 8 will deliver more value than ever before. With the clubbing of web workers with Angular CLI, developers will enjoy greater ease and flexibility.

Apart from the bundling of the web workers, Angular CLI will also have the opt-in usage sharing feature, which will help to share telemetry about the usage of the Angular CLI with your Angular development team. Though you could share telemetry earlier by opting for other tools, for the first time you are having this as the out-of-the-box feature from new Angular 8. Obviously, by sharing the CLI usage details, developers can actually help to improve the Angular development tools to a great extent.

Angular 8 is also going to take care of the Angular key constituents. The new Angular 8 is going to provide updates for key dependencies like the RxJS and TypeScript. TypeScript developers are always known to the Angular community for delivering an array of powerful new features with every subsequent release.

Though, even while you are using earlier Angular versions, you can always upgrade to the latest TypeScript version. By keeping up with TypeScript, Angular 8 will remain open to the improvements offered by the TypeScript developers. From Angular 8 onwards Angular CLI by default will use the latest version of TypeScript. 

Coming across new features with the latest version of a framework is what we all expect. But we always tend to upgrade to the latest versions principally because of the promise of performance boost and the value additions. Well, this is precisely why we need to conclude this post with a comparison between the currently running Angular 7.2 and the upcoming Angular 8.0.

There are a few things that we need to tell before explaining the details of this comparative benchmark. The comparison of the performance is evaluated by running the two Angular versions separately with a new app. The audit tab of the Google Chrome browser has been used to evaluate the performance benchmarks. For the simulated run of the app on a mobile device in the audit tab if the Chrome we used

The setting entitled 'Applied Fast 3G, 4X CPU Slowdown'.

Before you decide to run it with your own code, this benchmark comparison gives you a basic idea about the differences between two Angular versions in terms of performance.

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Angular 7.2: The production build of the app, which used Angular 7.2 had a memory footprint of 240KB. The performance benchmark figures are mentioned below.

Angular 8.0.0: After the production build of the Angular 8 app, it had a memory footprint of 250KB, which is almost the same when compared with its predecessor. Though with a new browser with full ES2015 support the footprint is as lower as

170KB. It is a great performance enhancement for mobile users running on average connection speed. Let's look at the performance benchmark results of Angular 8.

So, Angular 8 seems to be a clear winner over Angular 7.2. Bundled with so many value additions and overall performance boosting elements, Angular 8 is bound to be the de-facto Angular language after its official release in 2020.

Author Bio

Paul Osborne is Chief Technical Office of Cerdonis Technologies LLC - Mobile App Development Company in USA. As Technical Professional I do have gathered knowledge of various technologies in a domain of mobile app development which I love to share to the world threw my writings.