What is Angular's Ivy renderer and how does it improve performance?

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In Angular 9 the Ivy renderer was introduced as the next-generation rendering engine and it replaced the older View Engine. Ivy has become the default in Angular and brought significant improvements like performance, bundle size, debugging, and developer experience.

Do you know what exactly is Ivy? How does it make Angular applications faster and more efficient? No, then let's explore!

✅ What Is Ivy in Angular?

Ivy is the engine under the hood of Angular that takes your templates and turns them into the JavaScript that browser could run.

Before Ivy Angular used the View Engine. It worked, but it had its downsides—like larger bundle sizes, slower compile times and many other productivity issues. Ivy was built to fix these issues and make Angular apps faster/easier to work.

✅ But Do You Know How Ivy Improves Performance?

Let's dive into the details. Here I will show you some of the ways how Ivy improves the performance of Angular applications:

1. 🔧 Smaller Bundle Sizes

  • Using Ivy, Angular generates a highly optimized code that reduces the size of the JavaScript bundles(that was sent to the browser).
  • So in your application, you will have smaller bundle sizes and faster load times.

2. ⚡ Faster Compilation and Build Times

  • Ivy brings incremental compilation to the table. In simple terms, Angular now recompiles only the components you actually changed, not the entire app. This can seriously speed up build times, especially when you’re working on larger projects.

3. 🔍 Improved Debugging

  • You can make debugging in Ivy much smoother. You get clearer error messages and better tools, making it much easier to figure out what’s going on when something breaks. Moreover, you can even inspect components and directives right from the browser console, which saves a ton of time. And you will deliver your product faster.

4. 🧹 Better Tree-Shaking

  • Did you know that Ivy was designed with tree-shaking in mind? It makes the smaller, faster apps possible by eliminating the unused services and components more effectively.

5. 🚀 More Efficient Runtime Performance

  • Very important topic is that Ivy introduces a more efficient rendering pipeline that reduces the work needed to update DOM and it leads to the faster runtime updates and improves app responsiveness.

Additional Benefits of Ivy

Improved Dynamic Component Loading

  • From Angular 13+ Ivy simplifies dynamic creation and loading of components that eliminated the need for ComponentFactoryResolver.
  • Developers can now create components at runtime with less boilerplate code. It is a great improvement for performance, what you think about?

Backward Compatibility

  • If you are using old projects, Ivy is compatible also with existing Angular projects that makes migration from older versions seamless.
  • It allows the lazy loading of components and services that improves scalability.

✅ Wrapping Up

Ivy is a game-changer for Angular. It delivers:

  • Smaller bundles
  • Faster builds
  • Better runtime performance
  • Simplified debugging and tooling

With Ivy, Angular applications are leaner, faster, and easier to maintain and providing a better experience for both developers and users, is it not great?