Angular 3’s due date is approaching

The news that Angular 3 is coming spread like wildfire. After Rob Wormald, developer advocate at Google and Angular core team member, told InfoWorld that Angular 3 will be released in March 2017, concerned developers took to Reddit to complain about the consequences. Wormald joined the conversation and assured his peers that it’s not the end of the world. He claimed that Angular 3 is not a rewrite and emphasized that the team does not want to “rewrite a framework ever again.”

Redditor argues_too_much claimed that “having a major version change every 6 months leaves the door open for there to be any sort of breaking changes with no backward compatibility. Deprecation doesn’t necessarily account for that. A person can change an API method in a breaking way without deprecating it. It might work fine when you release something, but then a year down the line you want to add some features and you hit a bug, and the only fix could be in 2 major versions later upgrade, but those 2 major versions could require heavy changes to the code base.” 

Existing usage of a stable API (i.e. your code will keep working) will still be supported during the deprecation period, “and you’ll always have more than 6 months (two major releases) to update,” Wormald responded. The developer advocate did say that they will notify developers ahead of time when features will be deprecated and that feature will still be supported for two major release cycles but argues_too_much argued that developers will have to “trust that fixes will be backported” — which represents a big risk for them. Wormald stepped in to assure the user that the Angular team is “trying to strike a balance here between continuing to improve Angular (which is very young, comparatively) and providing stability to the ecosystem built up around Angular.”

We think that this strikes a reasonable middle ground between those two things.

 It should be noted as well, that this policy is highly inspired by the policies the React and Ember teams implemented, and their communities are generally pretty happy with it.

Wormald also told InfoWorld that Angular 3 will include a template compiler which offers feedback in an IDE on errors in a template and will generate 25 percent less code. As Todd Motto, developer advocate at Telerik, puts it, “Angular 3 will be Angular 2, but with some more cool stuff.”