[jbverschoor]

Well unfortunately ionic2 is super slow to develop.. Ionic1 is nice in the beginning, but if your app grows, you're simply waiting and waiting. This is a problem with all javascript frameworks.. just 'watch' a directory for changes and restart, recompile everything

[mtrpcic]

This isn't that big an issue if you set your JS build pipeline up properly with modern tools. Webpack can chunk your built files and will only rebuild the ones it needs to upon change. Combine that with hot module reloading and things are snappier than they've been in a long time.