What to Expect in Angular 8

What’s New in Angular 8

Angular 8 is finally here! Although the Angular had originally planned to release Angular 8 in March or April, it didn’t happen until late May.

With the new release now available, it’s important to understand what has changed so you’ll know how to approach Angular 8. Since Angular 7 is going to be supported until April of 2020, you may decide that it’s not worth upgrading if Angular 7 already meets all of your needs.

With that in mind, let’s walk through what is new in Angular 8.

Angular Ivy

For more than a year, the Angular team has been talking about the new Ivy renderer they’ve been working on. Although the team has spoken and written about Ivy on many occasions, we still haven’t seen an official release. Well, that’s about to change. Sort of…

The Angular team has announced that they’re going to be including Ivy in Angular 8 as an opt-in preview. Many Angular developers were hoping for a final release of Ivy, but that’s not what we’re getting in this release. A preview is a lot better than no view. Trying out the preview will let you see how well your current Angular applications work — or don’t work — with Ivy.

If you’re not familiar with Ivy, is it something you should care about? If the user experience of your apps is important to you, then Ivy is definitely something you should care about. Although the framework has made huge improvements in file size and runtime speed since the days of Angular 2, Angular apps often tend to be on the heavy side when it comes to file size and memory use.

Ivy aims to change this. Compared with the current Angular View Engine, Ivy provides the following benefits:

• The code generated by the Angular compiler is now much easier for humans to read and understand
• Rebuild times are significantly faster
• Decreased payload size, so it will take browsers less time to download and parse your applications
• Better template type checking, so you can catch more…