Why does anyone use Angular in production?
This website is so hard to read from contrast to the scrolling. Can someone copy the text here?<p>*EDIT*: I did it here (and for the most part I mainly agree with the sentiment behind this article):<p># Angular is Rotten to the Core<p>I find Angular an impressive front-end framework for just how badly it is designed, top to bottom, and yet how large of a cult-ish following it has. There exists a weird “everyone knows it” mentality that in practice seems to be entirely an illusion. There is the strange “no one got fired for picking Google” echo of ancient ibm mistakes exacerbated by Google barely dogfooding Angular (and arguably never successfully). There is the awful internal politics of Google that have produced many horror stories from former Angular developers, former open source community contributors, and combinations in between, and an impression that the rabbit hole goes only deeper if you could dig beneath Google NDAs and secrecy.<p>## Why does anyone use Angular in production?<p>I’ll start with the sociopolitical weirdness and save the real meaty technical stuff for the end. Let’s think of it like one of those long, mostly useless food blog narratives to air some grievances before the technical equivalent of a recipe.<p>##  “Everyone Knows It”<p>When we started a greenfield project at my employer (opinions here are mostly mine and not that of my employer and other usual disclaimers apply, of course) I suggested React, as I was comfortable and happy with React in other projects, and even did some prototypes in early testing in React. I was brought on to the project to be “the backend expert”, so I was overruled because “no one knows React” and “everyone knew Angular”. I didn’t know Angular at the time, other than gut instincts from skimming tutorials that it was “Enterprise” and “Bloated” in all of the worst senses of both words, and some hesitation&#x2F;general “sense of doom” from reading the blogs of Rob Eisenberg (because I had used Durandal successfully in previous lives and Aurelia semi-successfully in more recent projects; I’ll come back to all of this later in this post).<p>As soon as we started digging into real world usage of the application it became very apparent to me that everyone that claimed they “knew” Angular, simply didn’t. Out of frustration with application performance and modularization needs and so many little problems, I found myself increasingly having to become an expert on Angular, and the more of an Angular expert I’ve become the angrier I’ve become for using Angular at all.<p>I think there are two big lies that add up to an illusion that “everyone” knows Angular: the Angular template language uses an `.html` file extension, and Angular Dependency Injection at first glance looks “Enterprise” and familiar to Java developers especially. (Sometimes C# developers too.)<p>The first I think is the biggest illusion and the one that causes so much trouble. React’s jsx&#x2F;tsx looks “weird” at first, and “no one knows it” without at least some learning curve. Vue and Svelte aren’t liars either and people realize there is a learning curve to learn their `.vue` and `.svelte` templates. Like the much mocked Jurassic Park lines “it’s a Unix system, I know this”, despite the many variations of Unix and the weird ui shown on the screens that wouldn’t have been familiar to anyone, “it’s an html file, I know this” is an amazing misdirection of Angular’s. Angular’s template language is no less a complicated template system like `.vue` or `.svelte` or `.jsx`, but that first impression from junior developers that they know enough html it will be “easy” and they already know it is amazing (and wrong).<p>Also, I realize that Angular themselves refuse to call it a “template language” and go out of their way to call it a “view engine”. They seem to insist that you could ship the template language’s html to a browser (as Knockout used to do, using only html compatible custom attributes, back in the day), but at the point where you have an aotcompiler for it is the point where I think you have to admit it is a custom language. At least in my opinion. Angular’s insistence that it is “just using html” seems so much intentional propaganda at this point to keep the “everybody knows Angular” reputation despite an incredibly complex template language compiler and build process.<p>## “No One Got Fired For Picking Google”<p>Google, for the most part, has never used Angular. The few projects that have obviously used Angular are notoriously awful performing applications.<p>The largest and most commonly noticed is the gcp cloud console. Performance is definitely something it is not known for. Google and its proponents will argue that the gcp console cross-cuts a huge number of teams that all have to deliver components and maybe don’t all individually have the right performance experts and collectively don’t have the right incentives aligned to better coordinate performance across teams and so a lot of the performance is left at “out of the box” configured from base settings. (Despite gcp being a huge revenue source for Google, a major competitive battle front with aws&#x2F;Azure, and presumably time wasted spent configuring things ingcp can be directly associated with time not running billable operations.)<p>Angular proponents would point out how great it is that Google doesn’t get “special privilege” and it’s almost a badge of honor that one of the largest instances of Angular usage in the company performs so poorly. This kind of “fairness” sounds great on screen photons, but seems immediately and obviously flawed. Is it really that great that everyone is equal in having bad performance out of the box? If engineers “down the hall” and paid out of some of the same budgets can’t get it to perform, who can?<p>One of the big lies implicit in the “no one went wrong going with Google” thing here is that it implies that Angular works well at Google scale, and yet here clearly it falls down. Regardless of what Google thinks of itself, Google isn’t special: other companies have multiple cross-cutting teams involved in building websites&#x2F;dashboards&#x2F;consoles&#x2F;portals all together. It isn’t some special Google-only workflow, it’s a common problem, that Angular is advertised to solve. (It’s one of the oldest reasons for component-based systems since the invention of the computer.)<p>It’s possible that there is a use case that Angular was designed to fit. (That’s somehow not using a component model built to be a component model usable by multiple cross-cutting teams, despite that’s why they have a component model.) But I’ve come to doubt that given it doesn’t really seem like Angular was designed for specific workflows and instead it was designed to meet the goals of specific egos.<p>## A Toxic Workplace?<p>Here especially I can only make second and third hand speculations. Please take all of this with a grain of salt, try to find your own primary sources, and realize that even primary sources that are publicly posted to blogs such as Medium are filtered a degree or two sometimes away due to Angular’s relationship with Google NDAs and other secrecy tools.<p>The reports are that Angular is among the many projects at Google that appears to be following Ego-Driven Development. (Google is also not special here and certainly plenty of companies practice Ego-Driven Development, but Google has picked up something of a particular reputation for it in the way that it infects their promotion culture and odd incentives to create products that duplicate existing ones at the company and disincentives to support and maintain existing ones.) Angular tries to be an open source community-supported project (in addition to getting the marketing weight from Google behind it), so some of this dirty laundry has aired very publicly. (Compared to what we can mostly only speculate about, say, Google’s revolving door of chat apps.)<p>Most of what I followed second hand was the saga of Rob Eisenberg. I had been following Rob because of Durandal. I loved Durandal for a few years. It was a great minimalist spa framework that left the hard template&#x2F;dataflow work to Knockout and then just filled in the spa gaps (routing, component lifecycle). On the back of Durandal Rob was invited to work on Angular (in the awkward Angular.js to Angular transition years). There was some sort of falling out some time into that effort, presumably for creative differences, and at the end of that Rob created Aurelia as an answer to Angular’s goals.<p>(I used Aurelia for a project before Angular. I didn’t like it anywhere like I liked Durandal and kind of disliked it. Though in context of having now worked with Angular I can see better where it came from and some of how it wound up departing from Durandal’s principles. I don’t expect to want to use Aurelia again on a project, but I’d definitely recommend it to any “Angular shop” that wants a lighter weight alternative that “everyone knows” and possibly has more of a pit of success than Angular. Faint praise, of course, but still praise.)<p>I offer this (possibly?) slander mostly as an appetizer to the technical discussion. It’s not entirely unrelated, as I find it interesting background. It answers to at least sate some of my curiosity how Angular got designed the way it was and who it was maybe designed for. (Ego being an obvious and clear answer to both.)<p>## No One Knows Angular (But I Know More Now, Sorry)<p>My fast ramp up to team “expert” on Angular came from a path that was rare and while I would never assert that it makes me a better “expert” than most on Angular, it certainly makes me a peculiar one, especially in being able to pinpoint to some key things were Angular has created “pits of failure” (where it’s just too easy for developers following “best practices” and tutorials and trying to do things “the Angular way” find themselves failing through no fault of their own).<p>One of my odd paths is use of Aurelia <i>before</i> Angular. Aurelia has a better Dependency Injection system than Angular. (In part by going all in on Typescript’s experimental decorators support rather than half-in. Though I think both are wrong to use an *experimental* flag in Typescript based on a tc39 proposal that has been rejected one and a half times.) In particular, Aurelia tree-shakes better out of the box and without a lot of config work. Aurelia’s cli is better at finding circular dependency mistakes and things that may not tree-shake well (and suggesting fixes when noticed). A lot of Angular’s easiest to fix performance problems stem directly from the overly complicated and not very good “Modules” system that gets in the way of all of the smarts and advances packer tools have put into es2015module support and es2015 module treeshaking. The “Modules” provide a second parallel import system that is harder to tree-shake, easily gets out of sync, and actively gets in the way to getting bundle sizes down.<p>The other somewhat peculiar path was that I’ve been a Reactive Extensions fan for a long time. I’ve done C# ui apps with Reactive Extensions from when ReactiveX was still fresh out of Labs&#x2F;Preview kindergarten. In C# I use ReactiveX (and more recently IAsyncEnumerable InteractiveX) as extremely useful tools in complicated (but easily described by ReactiveX) backend dataflows and multi-threading and plumbing. I used Cycle.js, a js ui framework built for first class ReactiveX, for years before running off to React for the larger ecosystem. Even in React I tend to keep redux-observable as a tool in my arsenal for complicated data flow. I’ve even built some interesting [Discord bot logic “backends” in redux-observable](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.worldmaker.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;redux-observable&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.worldmaker.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;redux-observable&#x2F;</a>). I know ReactiveX and RxJS pretty well at this point, their strengths and weaknesses, the differences between hot and cold observables and when you want each to apply to which problem, when and where to apply ReactiveX&#x2F;RxJS as great tools (and how best to do in places that don’t phase junior developers too much), and some good ideas where ReactiveX&#x2F;RxJS isn’t the best tool for the job.<p>If there’s a core decision in the core library of Angular that is most emblematic a pit of failure it’s the incredibly half-assed adoption of RxJS. This one decision, this one broken usage, affects everything else, contributes to so much of the performance churn of people’s apps by default *especially* when they believe they are following best practices. Angular intentionally ignores RxJS best practices in setting its own “best practices”. Angular decided that they wanted to mix all of the concerns of RxJS Observables, BehaviorSubjects, and classic Node-era Event Emitters in one core EventEmitter class that is the <i>worst of all worlds</i>. This adds an RxJS dependency that bloats *every* Angular app everywhere no matter how well the developers know RxJS. RxJS is a huge dependency to do that with. RxJS has gotten better at tree-shaking itself, but it is still a huge chunky library.<p>RxJS is hard to learn. It does have a huge learning curve. It’s not just something “everyone knows”. If there is a bigger bright neon sign that should be blaring on top of all the assumptions and assertions that “everyone knows Angular” it should be “No one knows RxJS”. You can understand why Angular developers might want to provide “escape hatches” from RxJS because they want make the framework more approachable. However, by ignoring RxJS best practices and making the EventEmitter publicly a BehaviorSubject in api, Angular gives developers an escape hatch deep inside in the core for ignoring RxJS best practices (BehaviorSubjects are meant to be generally avoided, but when used as internal details of an encapsulated api), an excuse to avoid learning RxJS until it is far too late, and almost always immediately falling into a pit of failure that results in bad performance and the many of the worst of singleton “god objects” that are just nasty global variables with much more complicated APIs. Right out of the starting gate, Angular “best practices” cause so much of their own misery.<p>It’s a worst of both worlds situation: why take on a huge, complicated dependency like RxJS if you are just going to immediately provide system breaking escape hatches? These escape hatches then breed like rabbits, having a ripple effect on the entire ecosystem. The few libraries that are more likely to use RxJS for complex behaviors are more likely to get it wrong simply by following the bad example directly from right inside Angular’s core and leaking BehaviorSubjects everywhere. The ones that don’t want to use RxJS just sit on complex webs of escape hatches and easily broken state mechanics (especially if they fall into just using global singletons everywhere). So many tutorials and examples of “good code” are littered with bad RxJS usage (BehaviorSubjects leaking across encapsulation boundaries, Observable subscriptions without matching unsubscriptions (classic malloc without free; reference counting is hard and everyone is bad at it and will be for all time), cold&#x2F;hot problems, over-subscriptions, and more even more complicated RxJS data flow problems (that at best are just too much work and at worst are memory leaks and performance problems waiting to happen).<p>The ripple effect happens inside the Angular house too as other Angular components can’t make up their minds to embrace RxJS or not, can’t make up their mind how many of their own escape hatches they need to add, and just constantly adding to the escape hatch proliferation problem.<p>Angular Routing tries to use RxJS deeply and while it doesn’t let BehaviorSubjects directly escape into its public apiit offers an almost equally bad “snapshot” escape hatch.<p>Angular’s HttpClient embraces RxJS deeply in its outputs, but for what are essentially over-weight Promises. It doesn’t take Observables for input, nor does it use them in the middle of its processing pipeline, and in being used for not much more than over-complicated Promises it still has ripples like the other escape hatches. Some developers start to associate Observables as “bad Promises that you can’t use async&#x2F;await with” and take away from it that `subscribe` is just like Promise `then` and use it like bad pre-async&#x2F;await era callback hell. It directly contributes to the subscribe without unsubscribe problem in so many tutorials and sample code. There actually is an easy solution that these tutorials&#x2F;samples could use: RxJS Observables provide a good `toPromise()` implementation that does the subscribe and immediately unsubscribe after first value dance, and lets you use traditional async&#x2F;await. (I’ve made this suggestion to at least a couple of tutorial authors I’ve found. But there’s no way I alone can post that suggestion to the expansive number of bad tutorials in the Angular ecosystem.)<p>Of course, Angular’s HttpClient could just return Promises if that is 99% of what people use them for and most uses of HttpClient are single value expectations. HttpClient offers a somewhat plausible reason for this: with an optional config parameter HttpClient will provide Observables with more values that include a stream of progress values. In theory, this might be useful for better progress reporting in the app, but in practice I’ve still yet to see a good library take good advantage of it. HttpClient isn’t in a library that is setup (in current Angular “organization” structures) to offer an out-of-the-box ui component to make use of it. It’s a feature that might as well not exist given very little good guidance on how to use it (and again that I’ve never seen anyone really take advantage of it). Even in trying to add progress reporting to projects I’m working on, it was much easier to build a dependency-injected HttpInterceptor that kicks off and stops NProgress (and isn’t far removed from things I’ve done all the way back to Durandal and its middleware). HttpInterceptors are “middleware” and at least they aren’t intentionally built to be RxJS escape hatches, but here it is the one escape hatch I found myself particularly using from a provided Observable, because it was so much simpler.<p>Angular’s Template Language doesn’t bother with first-class support for Observables (though that would potentially make things a lot cleaner; Knockout called its bindings Observables for a reason, way back in the day). Instead the template language relegates it to AsyncPipe, which I was angry when I found it in its almost hidden spot in Angular’s documentation which also relegates it to something of an afterthought. The other obvious thing that would clean up a lot of tutorials&#x2F;samples (including and especially here in Angular’s own documentation!) with regard to Observables is if far more tutorials&#x2F;samples used `| async` pipes instead of manual Observable subscribe&#x2F;unsubscribe in example components. (Or you know, if Angular had added Observable support first class into the template language instead of as an afterthought.) Again, RxJS best practices heavily suggest reducing the number of subscribe&#x2F;unsubscribe to a bare minimum, and yet almost every example in Angular’s documentation (and from there so much of the rest of the ecosystem) use manual subscribe&#x2F;unsubscribe rather than something like AsyncPipe that can handle it automatically. Though I realize that doing that would mean more Angular documentation would need to teach RxJS sharing (`shareReplay(1)` being one of the most common in my arsenal) and that would risk needing to teach the hot&#x2F;cold Observable problem and directly risk that “everybody knows Angular” reputation for the actual learning curve (that’s still there anyway, just hidden behind bad documentation and bad practices as “best practices”, because apparently Angular is okay with bad performance out of the box).<p>At this point I’ve contributed more than I should have had to to fix RxJS-related documentation mistakes to the wider Angular ecosystem. I’ve left notes to tutorial writers how they might better their tutorials (though there is no incentive to do so, because “everybody knows Angular”). I’ve glanced at the bad Observable code in entire libraries, shuddered in horror, and wrote my own in a third of the code (and been thankful for the production performance problems I avoided). Two of the worst offenders I’ve seen are Angular Material and Angular cdk, and if Google can’t get Observables right in its own “second party” libraries, I don’t blame anyone else in the ecosystem but the Angular core team for these problems. Also, tossing Angular Material and Angular cdk out the airlock was a huge “performance fixing” development effort on my part (after what the frontend devs defaulted to), and keeping them out is a larger effort because so many tutorials and other third party components “suggest” them (“no one got fired for picking Google”).<p>## Suggestions For a Better Angular (“Project Gawky”)<p>So I’m not a monster, and this is a “recipe” blog like I said, so I’m happy to leave with a thought experiment of what something like Angular would look like if it properly embraced Observables instead of being wishy-washy with them all the way deep into the core. I think Observables are a great idea for a frontend framework (again, I used Cycle.js for some time previously). Let’s call this thought experiment “Project Gawky” (as a fun synonym for “angular” when referring to a person that also implies a double meaning of observing).<p>At one point I toyed with the idea of attempting a toy proof of concept for “Project Gawky”, but so far as I know Angular’s “Ivy compiler” for its template language is not documented at all for reuse and I have no interest in building my own template language and especially not in trying to emulate the Angular template language just for a toy proof of concept.<p>Taking for assumption that the resemblance to html of Angular’s template language is a part of its success and something worth keeping, I’d start from what you can do if the only bindings you can do are Observables. The idea is basically RxJS-powered “modern” Knockout.<p>First, it would get rid of the incredible weirdness that is Angular’s two-way binding syntax (the strange bag-in-box `[(thing)]` that a lot of people don’t like or understand in Angular templates). Supporting which is an incredibly odd “code behind” pattern involving a normal property and an `EventEmitter` for when it changes, but only by the component itself because you want to avoid infinite loops by it accidentally re-emitting values it got from other components&#x2F;Angular.<p>But that’s a nice to have “side effect”, the real meat is what you can do once every output variable in the template is expressed as an Observable: combination and scheduling. For years now, React has been building a bunch of initiatives in somewhat parallel (Suspense, Concurrent, etc) to do a lot of complicated update combination and scheduling: in a nutshell, they want low priority dom updates to happen during the browser’s `requestAnimationFrame`timer, high priority updates (such as to inputs that the user is directly interacting with) to happen as soon as possible, and they want to be able to combine all of the updates to entire component sub-trees at once rather than showing partial updates as data is loaded. These initiatives have been fascinating to watch, especially as some of the information React is doing for this combination and scheduling work is “reverse-engineered” from the “pull” and “diff&#x2F;patch” nature of the Virtual dom. React has been doing some interesting smart things to gather more information, and the underpinnings of Hooks are fascinating in relationship to these efforts. (Though Hooks are required for some of it to work, they mostly just light up more “smarts” and even class-based components still sometimes benefit.)<p>An Observable based template engine potentially has a much easier time doing such complicated combination and scheduling with the comparative “push” nature of Observables. So easy and cheap it’s nearly free and out of the box. Combinators like `combineLatest` are the bread and butter operators for why you’d pick something like Observables in the first place. Observables have a direct concept of Schedulers which provide timing mechanics and moving some updates to happen at `requestAnimationFrame` may be as simple as adding `throttleTime(0, requestAnimationFrameScheduler)` to the right pipelines. Given an aot compiler (like Ivy) you could sometimes bake entire, complicated Observable pipelines for entire component trees at build time (including smart uses of combinators and schedulers) with little to no runtime code. In <i>theory</i> it is so much of what React has been trying to do with a lot of (successful and interesting) hard work in potentially a simpler and “cheaper” package deal.<p>Observables-first “Project Gawky” should reduce a lot of things that Angular relies on Dependency Injection for, or the very least reduce a lot of singletons acting as global state in the average project, so I could even see trying to use Dependency Injection still for wiring up some of the more complicated pipelines. di in that case might be a good way to better encapsulate BehaviorSubjects and remove their need from all “user” code. BehaviorSubjects are mostly an escape hatch around essentially circular dependencies and while di sometimes hates circular dependencies, in the case of Observables they make a certain sense. (Cycle.js’ name is not an accident.)<p>(To contrast with Cycle.js for the very few developers curious: Cycle.js’ Virtual dom approach has a very “Observables first” definition. Inverting it to be html Template “first” like an RxJS-based Knockout should feel very different from the approach of Cycle.js. “Smart templates” doing some pipeline management such as`requestAnimationFrameScheduler` is something mostly sort out of scope for Cycle.js, leaving that essentially for the “drivers”&#x2F;Virtual dom to reverse engineer similar to React, though you can do some such things by hand to give it a push. I’m not a fan of Angular’s Dependency Injection system, and while I’d simplify it, I can see a use for a Dependency Injection system in an Observable-first “Project Gawky” to clean up or at least simplify some of the harder bits of wiring&#x2F;plumbing I recall from Cycle.js.)<p>All it would take is taking Observables seriously and first class with fewer escape hatches. It would be a lot harder to learn, but might have a much greater pit of success (smarter update combination and scheduling, right there out of the box with little to no developer config or wiring needed), and presumably a smaller pit of failure. I ran out of interest in trying to build a toy “Project Gawky” proof of concept when I didn’t see an easy way to hack the Angular template language compilers for such an experiment, but I’ll happily code review and maybe pitch in if someone else wants to toy with the idea.