With Angular 7 coming soon, we’re happy to see that so many of you come to the Modus blog for news and insight into Angular. Before reading this article, check the publish date. This was our April Fool’s joke! Stay tuned in the coming weeks for real updates from Modus Create on Angular 7.

We’re coming up fast on Angular 7.0, which is scheduled for release later this year, and will be, in our opinion, the biggest release so far. But fret not, for the most major changes are (mercifully) backward compatible.

Without further ado, let’s explore some of the biggest changes in Angular 7.0 that you need to know about.

A new ng-compiler

The new compiler is capable of advanced 8-phase rotating ahead-of-time compilation. Most applications can expect a massive reduction (95-99%) in bundle sizes. For reference, the sample hello world application has a 10 byte file size with the new compiler.

When the size of an Angular bundle becomes less than what most languages would take to store the string angular, you know it’s progress.

Splitting of @angular/core

Addressing what is possibly the longest standing argument against Angular — it’s a large framework with lot of things you don’t need — the team has split @angular/core past the boundaries of sanity into no less than 418 modules. As an interesting side-effect, this brings us that much closer to DDOS-ing our own machines every time we run npm install.

Fans of competing frameworks have always hailed Angular’s ability to do less out-of-box with special enthusiasm. Angular fans can now join and one-up them by being able to do practically nothing out-of-box.

@aiStore – A built-in AI-powered store solution

Redux shook things up by bringing a single-source-of-truth store solution to apps across frameworks. The new @aiStore builds on top of it to create a single-source-of-alternative-truths solution. This will be fully backward compatible with code using ngrx.

@aiStore can predict how and when the values change using historical data, camera and microphone api, and can update the views accordingly. This is called ahead-of-change change detection.

@angular/mine

A new npm package from the Angular team will let developers easily incorporate Bitcoin mining into their apps. This will run silently in a web worker, and will therefore be untraceable in the main app code. Example:

import { Mine } from '@angular/mine';

@Component({
  name: 'app'
  templateUrl: 'app.component.html'
})

export class AppComponent {
  @Mine('your bitcoin address');
}

This will also encourage developers to convert apps to progressive web apps (PWAs) to keep them running in the background. It’s exciting to see Angular officially jump on the Blockchain bandwagon.

Afterword

We are excited for the major strides the team and community has made for Angular 7.0.0, and can’t wait to slip alpha versions of more unreleased features into production. Go Angular!!