angular 6 release date

Angular 6 Release Date

Angular 6 Will Be A Hit

Not much time has passed since the release of its fifth version in November, and the Angular team is already going to surprise us with the next one - Angular 6.

That’s not to say we didn’t expect it. On Github and other websites, it was possible to easily keep track of the slightest upgrades the Angular team was making with its brainchild during the last four months.

January 4 - see 5.2.0 beta.1

February 22 - check out Beta.5

March, 21 - get some new features and bugfixes

With such updates every nearly every week, we knew something big was coming.

Moreover, for the most inquiring minds, a release schedule was, is, and always will be at their disposal.

Will be the sixth version as good as the ‘pentagonal-donut’? Is a four-months period sufficient to create a fully-fledged version of a framework? And above all, will admirers of React give in to the dark side of Angular after all the work is done? The K&C team is going to find out!

What’s News?

Well, the first good news is that Brad Green, an engineering director at Google, values promises. Last November he made it clear that we should expect the emergence of Angular 6 at the end of the March - bada-bing, you have it.

Source: Angular v6 Tentative Schedule

What We Should Expect From Angular 6?

Now we'll talk about what awaits us in Angular 6. In fact, we are waiting for a lot of things. The release-candidate is already feature complete, and now you can test a new version on any of your applications. With this, you’re encouraged to add new issues on the official angular tracker in case something doesn’t work and you know how to fix it.

The Angular team has made so many bugfixes and added many additional features, so we decided to point out the most significant among them.

New Render Engine

Due to a new render engine Ivi, it’s necessary to activate a flag to work on it. This is  fantastic news. The application's performance and speed (based on synthetic tests) turned out to be better than at the latest version of Vue. Further, the size of the application has been reduced by 90%. It shows that with each new version, the framework is getting better and better.

Ivy Renderer Goals. Source: https://blog.angular.io/trip-report-from-ngatlanta-angulars-roadmap-inclusion-and-more-b6c8bae85417

New Compiler - ABC

Right now, Google hammers away at a new build system Bazel. According to the Angular team, it is now known that assembling projects with Bazel takes 2 seconds in an incremental build, and your applications will weigh a few Kbs due to the built-in Rollup and Uglify2.

“Every developer at Google gets to use a consistently fast, reliable, multi-language build tool that is offered as an open source tool called Bazel,” Green wrote in the post.

Angular Elements

Angular Elements is a project whose goal is to enable compilation of Angular components into Custom Elements. This is one of the long-awaited features that will allow users to write reusable components not only in the Angular ecosystem, but also in projects on React, Vue, Ember, and so on. There are already a bunch of examples where Angular-components are used in React or Preact. But the most important thing is that this has finally become possible.

Angular CLI update

Beginning from the CLI 1.7, you don’t have to worry about upgrading your application. There will be an opportunity to update data dependencies automatically. Moreover, there will be automatic refactoring of the deprecated functionality.

If you need to get more detailed information regarding all changes, find the link to the changelog.

And if you’re ready to download the Angular 6 release candidate, you can do it on Github. Another option is via terminal command ‘npm install -g @angular/cli@next’.

The official release of Angular 6 is planned on April 4, 2018. The Angular team is making its last corrections, hoping to finish everything in time. We’ve got our fingers crossed for the A-Team that they are on track and ready to deliver!