Been using Angular.js and 2+ exclusively for almost a decade now. Keep reading how the compiler allows static type checking and superior tree-shaking at build time but I'm just not seeing any sort of fruition after years of promises.

Every ngconf there's talk of the magical 2kb hello-world and bundle improvements with every major, yet the only bundles getting reductions are the hello-worlds and monster projects.

It seems we're in the medium bundle category and it's just disappointing that every version our bundle size hasn't moved or increased slightly.

We're currently at 2mb main/vendor after spending A LOT of time optimising and making everything lazy and then a team of 1 at our sister company release a Next.JS/React app with a main bundle about 1.3mb than ours using zero effort.

There's never anything obvious when it comes to analysing the bundle and it seems we're using everything we need: Angular, Material, RxJS, ApolloClient. Most of our forms use Formly (huge savings from repeated HTML)

All of our competitors are running React and have bundles about 1mb smaller than ours.

Every year I install the VSC Language Service plugin and have to disable it the same day due to it continuously crashing and killing the editor so it seems we'll never get to benefit from that.

Then I see a continuous stream of core developers leaving the Angular project due to toxic behaviour from Igor and it feels hopeless and depressing.

The one saving grace is that the entire ecosystem is written in TypeScript and it's nice seeing everything typed to perfection.

mgechev

Angular team member here :)

>our bundle size hasn't moved or increased slightly

Please make sure you are using the latest version of our compiler and runtime. Many developers observed significant improvements after the v9 release. Here's just one [example](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260864).

>Every ngconf there's talk of the magical 2kb hello-world

Currently, it's absolutely doable to get very small bundle size (<7-8KB) for a hello-world application. This, however, relies on private APIs. We haven't made them public yet, because not many folks are building hello world apps, but in the future we'll be exploring how to reduce the footprints of the framework even further for smaller apps.

>We're currently at 2mb main/vendor after spending A LOT of time optimising and making everything lazy

It is shocking for me that you're spending that much effort on optimizing your app, but you can't get your bundle below 2MB. I'm spending large chunk of my time looking into apps and thinking how to make them smaller & faster. I'll be more than happy to connect and brainstorm the same for your case. Please reach out to me on my hackernews username @google.com

>Every year I install the VSC Language Service plugin and have to disable it the same day due to it continuously crashing and killing the editor so it seems we'll never get to benefit from that.

Sorry to hear you had such an experience with the language service. If it keeps crashing, definitely report the problem here https://github.com/angular/angular/issues. We'll be very thankful if you share reproduction steps.

>Then I see a continuous stream of core developers leaving the Angular project due to toxic behaviour from Igor and it feels hopeless and depressing.

Folks leave and and others join. I can't comment on my co-workers experiences, but after 2 years working on Angular I haven't experienced any of the behavior you're referring to.

>The one saving grace is that the entire ecosystem is written in TypeScript and it's nice seeing everything typed to perfection.

Oh, I wish everything was that perfectly typed :). This is something the team and the community is constantly working on, but we still have a long way to go until we reach perfection.

KronisLV

This seems like a good example of productive discussion! While this won't necessarily solve the original poster's problems in of itself, it does give actionable steps on how to address them!

As for anyone interested in real world comparisons of many of the popular frameworks (though not necessarily the most bleeding edge versions), feel free to have a look here: https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld

The last time someone did a writeup on the results was in the March of 2020, but even then Angular wasn't necessarily that big in the bundle sizes that it generated: https://medium.com/dailyjs/a-realworld-comparison-of-front-e...

Though the situation can indeed worsen as you introduce more and more libraries into the mix and as the project grows.