Plans for Angular 8.0 and Ivy

Every week we get the question: "When will Ivy be ready?". It's time to tell how things are going with version 8.0, and also to share with you plans to bring to mind and release the Ivy engine.

In the eighth version, coming out in the second quarter of this year, we would like to introduce the possibility of the optional inclusion of the preliminary version of Ivy (Ivy Preview).

What's new in version 8.0

While most of our team has gone into development, we are ready to submit several updates for version 8.0, on which we are working so hard. It is worth noting that some features in the final version may differ from those described below.

• Differentiated loading of modern javascript.
  The CLI will now create bundles of both legacy (ES5) and modern (ES2015 +) JavaScript standards as part of the build process, which will be loaded on the client side depending on the browser, thereby reducing download speed and time to the first interaction in modern browsers. This functionality was developed jointly with Manfred Steyer and is based on his ngx-build-modern project.
• Ability to connect Ivy Preview.
  Rate how your application will work with Ivy and tell us your impressions so that we can make the necessary adjustments to the final version.
• Full compatibility with previous versions of the Angular router.
  We added backward compatibility mode, which will simplify the process of updating large projects. Developers will find it easier to switch to Angular by allowing deferred loading of portions of AngularJS applications using the $ route API.
• Improved Web Worker Bundling.
  Web workers are a great way to write code that runs in a separate thread, which speeds up the work and improves the parallelism of the application. According to numerous requests from developers, the command line interface will support banding web workers.
• Send usage data (optional).
  We will add telemetry to the command line interface in order to better understand the needs of developers. With your consent, we will collect anonymous data such as the commands you use or the build speed. The more information we have about how developers use Angular, the better we can make our product.
• Update dependencies.
  As always, we will update the dependencies, in particular TypeScript, RxJS, and Node, in order to keep up with the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem.

What will the next development of Ivy look like?

In version 8.0, we would like to introduce the ability to enable Ivy Preview. If you are not familiar with Ivy, check out Cara Ivy ’s presentation at the Google I / O 2018 conference .

In the preliminary version will be the ability to switch between Ivy and the standard View Engine . More information about this can be found in subsequent beta versions. If the application is compiled by the Ivy compiler, then any dependencies from Angular or other third-party components will still work, thanks to the compatibility compiler run. With the help of the preliminary version, you will be able to detect errors when connecting dependencies and help us refine the compiler.

What to expect from Ivy Preview:

1. Generated code that is easy to read and debug during execution
2. Reduced rebuild time
3. Optimized bundle size (reduction of bundle size is already noticeable on real applications, however some more improvements are planned for this part in the future)
4. Advanced template type checking
5. Full backward compatibility

Ivy is not yet ready to cover all use cases. Some features, such as i18n in Angular Universal, most likely will not be supported in the preview. In particular, the Angular Language Service will not work with the Ivy Preview.

The purpose of the preliminary version is to transfer existing applications to the Ivy engine without the need to rewrite them. There are also many Ivy-specific APIs that we will later add to our public API within Angular Labs and future releases.

When will everything be ready?

In April 2019, we plan to submit a release candidate, and a month later - the release of the publicly available version 8.0.0, but we can not give firm guarantees about the timing. In version 8.0.0 Ivy Preview is designed to verify the thesis of full compatibility with previous versions of Angular. It will also allow us to develop automated migration tools that may be needed in the future.

We would like to forcefully include Ivy for everyone in the next major version, scheduled for release this fall, as we aim to achieve full compatibility with previous versions and support for existing applications.

The introduction of the full functionality of Ivy in the ninth version will open up many opportunities for developers, and this is good news. Soon we will share our plans for the introduction of new features, API, features of using Ivy and developing with it.

Follow our blog posts, twitter and come to the ng-conf conference to learn more about our plans.