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Mostly I have various stylistic misgivings with Angular. I feel like I spend a lot of time on ceremony and piles of RxJS that would've just been simple function calls in React, which is what I did before. There are some things related to state management, especially module initialization, that it seems to me is a leading to a lot of code bloat to handle an initial state with null state that shouldn't actually ever exist, but that might be user error. More acutely, though, since upgrading to version 12 a few weeks ago, build times have run into several minutes (most of it spent in the "Sealing" phase), and it's developed a habit of crashing the dev server process due to running out of heap (on 16GB machines). We've tried various suggested workarounds and they work for some of our devs, but not for me. The past week or so even a single character change means waiting for the dev server to run out of heap, then restarting it and waiting for a complete rebuild. This takes several minutes all in all and requires manually restarting the server in the middle of it. I tried addressing the issue but I couldn't find a solution that actually worked, so I tried to upgrade to Angular 13 in the hope that it might go away. That took a day to just get it to build, but then I couldn't get our application to start. So now I've put off upgrading, which is obvs also a worrying prospect. We're an early stage start-up in the middle of a major crunch and it's frankly a bit of a nightmare. I've been keeping busy in other parts of the stack as best I can, but as you can imagine that's really not what a three-person team needs. Is this the fault of me, my lack of knowledge of Angular internals, and our messy code base? Most likely! But I did years of React before and I was never in such a mess. I also find the Angular build system quite hard to understand and debug and I'm not entirely sure what the benefit is. Something about server-side rendering? IDK. I do some Elixir/Phoenix in my spare time, I feel like I get 99% of the functionality there for 1% of the effort (and machine resources). We're going to need to bring in outside help if I don't crack it in the next few days but I'm frankly not really sure what the budget is like. Fun times! |
Had to work on an Angular project or two, they were largely passable and didn't cause too many problems. Admittedly felt a bit close to writing back end code at times, even - pretty boring and predictable. In Angular the type system was also reasonably easy to use, even with things like non-nullable/nullable/optional values etc.
Had to work on a few React projects, the JavaScript ones were pleasant to work with and develop (seriously, React's functional components are an amazing time saver for display components), but as soon as you introduced TypeScript and Redux as well as plenty of hooks and even custom hooks, it went down the drain.
Perhaps that's a bit what you're experiencing with RxJS, which adds a ton of complexity in of itself - being able to start with just Angular and go from there (or in my case - using MobX instead of Redux which is just so much nicer to use) might have been more passable.
Actually made a sibling comment like this, though it's not as detailed as i'd like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30220131
But hey, good luck with bending Angular to your will! If nothing else, i can acknowledge many codebases out there being a mess!