The developers of Angular 12, a planned upgrade to the popular Google-built web development framework, have set their sights on a host of improvements, ranging from better integration with deployment providers to improved error messages.

Currently planned for release in May 2021, Angular 12 would follow the November release of Angular 11, which offered stricter types and better router performance.

Among the improvements under consideration for Angular 12 is having ng build  compiler command and the yarn build bundler command running production builds by default. The goal would be to improve integration with many deployment providers, such as Heroku, Netlify, and others, according to Minko Gechev, who works on Angular at Google. Another item on the prospective features list is improved error messages, with top 10 errors getting much more detailed error messages and docs.

Other capabilities eyed for Angular 12 include:

  • Release of the ng-linker, to allow distribution of Angular Ivy libraries to NPM. This would allow deprecation of the compatibility compiler and improve build time.
  • Tearing down the test module and environment after each test. This revision would significantly improve test speed.
  • Production-ready support for the Webpack 5 module builder.
  • CLI use of strict mode by default for new projects.
  • Support for inline Sass in components.
  • A new version of the Ivy language service that provides improved type checking.
  • Trimming of non-critical CSS for inlined styles in Universal. This experimental feature would be enabled as an opt-in or opt-out capability. Angular Universal renders Angular applications in the server.

The Angular development team previously published a roadmap for the technology that cited capabilities such as Webpack 5 support. Point releases of Angular 11 remain in development, with a planned Angular 11.1 release set to boost performance and offer improvements for the compiler, the compiler CLI, and the language service, along with bug fixes.

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