Angular 18: Exciting New Features
Angular 18 has arrived, packed with new features and enhancements designed to elevate your development experience and boost the performance of your Angular applications. Let’s dive into some of the most notable updates in this latest release.
1. Differential Loading
Angular 18 introduces differential loading, which creates separate bundles for modern and legacy browsers. This optimizes performance and reduces bundle size for modern browsers while maintaining compatibility with older ones. To enable differential loading, update your Angular project configuration:
2. Enhanced Angular Ivy
Angular Ivy, the next-gen compilation and rendering pipeline, is now even better in Angular 18. It brings improved performance, smaller bundle sizes, and enhanced debugging capabilities. Importantly, Ivy is now the default rendering engine.
3. Opt-In Strict Mode
For stricter type checking and performance optimizations, Angular 18 introduces opt-in strict mode. Activate it by adding "strict": true to your tsconfig.json file:
4. Improved ESLint Support
Angular 18 offers better integration with ESLint, allowing you to use it alongside or instead of TSLint. To set up ESLint, install the necessary packages and configure your ESLint rules:
npm install --save-dev @angular-eslint/builder @angular-eslint/eslint-plugin @angular-eslint/eslint-plugin-template @angular-eslint/template-parser eslint @typescript-eslint/parser @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin
5. Updates to Angular Material
The official Angular component library, Angular Material, sees various updates in Angular 18, including new components and improvements to existing ones. Update your Angular Material version to access these enhancements:
ng update @angular/material
6. Angular Router Enhancements
Angular 18 enhances the Angular Router with better support for lazy loading modules, improved route configuration, and increased performance. These changes help create more efficient and maintainable routing.
7. Performance Boosts
Several performance optimizations in Angular 18 lead to faster compilation times, reduced bundle sizes, and improved runtime performance, ensuring your applications are quicker and more efficient.
8. Improved Internationalization (i18n)
With Angular 18, internationalization (i18n) support is more robust, making it simpler to build multilingual applications. New tools and APIs streamline the process of adding translations and managing localized content.
9. Angular DevTools Integration
Angular 18 integrates seamlessly with Angular DevTools, a browser extension that offers powerful debugging and profiling tools. This enables developers to inspect component trees, track state changes, and analyze performance directly in the browser.
10. Support for TypeScript 4.7
The latest TypeScript version, 4.7, is now supported in Angular 18. This update brings new language features, improved type checking, and enhanced editor support, further enhancing your development experience.
Conclusion
Angular 18 is a significant update, bringing a host of new features and improvements. These enhancements enable developers to create more efficient, performant, and maintainable applications. Embrace these updates to elevate your Angular projects. That's it... Happy coding!