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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Just use Angular and stop worrying. Batteries included, it works and works well.

Yes there was a big change from v1 to v2, but we are at v19 now I think and upgrades are pretty painless IME (I generally don't even really notice them happening, and there is even a tool to help know what changed: https://angular.dev/update-guide) I've been using it at BigCos now for years and it's really just totally fine, and importantly zero drama.

They key thing is you only need angular so you don't need a whole fleet of dependencies that you also need to migrate at the same time.

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Upgrading to standalone components and the new signal API right now, not sure I’d say this avoids the frontend treadmill

standalone for us was piecemeal - just do it one by one line of code here or there when you are already in the component making other changes.

Likewise signals it was trivial to just change @Input() to input (ok slight simplification but not by much - I think there are automated scripts to do it anyway if you want to do it in one fell swoop?) when already in a component making changes.

But you didn't have to, which is nice. You could take your time doing it but by bit if you wanted, no rush etc. I don't think the old ways are even fully gone yet anyway?

You may not have to today, but you will one day. They will remove zone.js and there will be a whole host of deprecated libraries and outdated blog posts about how to do things the “angular” way. If the vite dev server didnt feel so much snappier, I would lament it, however, I think overall its a nice change. And sure, just change components while you are in there, but this is for my blog libraries I work on in my spare time. A lot of the standalone stuff just feels like change for change sake and the scripts did not run against a library project. I tried to dig into the @angular/cli repo to try and figure out what was going on, but after reading a few classes noped out and just converted by hand. Only takes a couple of hours or a day to test, but thats 0 productivity time. Change detection is different now and leveraging ngOnChanges is def broken now, zone js removal is experimental, and all of it so Angular becomes more like React as far as I can tell. My new projects are Django with templates and post backs. Its a breath of fresh air.

+1 for Angular, upgrading has always been very easy and somewhere since V15 or so the build times have gotten insanely fast. Hot reloading a largeish cross-platform app with WASM takes less than 3 seconds. Deploys are also very simple.

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