Angular 12 set to deprecate legacy View Engine pipeline support

Angular 12 set to deprecate legacy View Engine pipeline support

The Angular project team has given developers a heads up that the upcoming Angular 12 release deprecates the legacy View Engine compilation and rendering pipeline, with the newer Ivy pipeline to become the default option.

Announcing the move on the Angular Blog, the team claimed the change should not require most developers to take action. This is because the Ivy rendering and compilation engine, which was introduced in v9, has already been many developers’ default experience for the past year.

Angular is an open-source web application framework built by a team at Google. Ivy was developed to replace View as part of an effort to make Angular simpler, faster, and easier to maintain, according to the project team.

To ensure interoperability with the old pipeline, the Angular team developed compatibility layers, including a compiler called ngcc that compiles View Engine libraries so that Ivy applications can make use of them. This means that developers can currently use either the Ivy or View Engine for their applications and libraries.

The Angular teams says that it can see from telemetry data that the vast majority of applications are now using Ivy, enabling them to deprecate View Engine. However, to ensure a smooth transition for libraries dependant on Angular framework and components, these will continue to be distributed in View Engine format.

Looking ahead to Angular 13 the team said it expects to be able to transition Angular and its components as well, as the majority of third party libraries will already be using Ivy. Over time, with the new Ivy library distribution on both library and application, developers should expect to see fewer ngcc compilations.

Library developers that are not yet ready to move to Ivy yet can opt out for now – see the Angular blog for full details. A release candidate of Angular 12 is available on GitHub.