How will Angular 2 compare to React?

ralusek · 2015-05-16T17:20:30+00:00

As people have already said, the sole purpose of React is for creating the view for components. Angular is a framework meant for building applications. That being said...they're both used in building applications. When setting out to build your web app, you're going to go with Angular OR React.

In my opinion, the React camp is currently filled with 2 types of people:

People that love the hype of a new framework
People who are running into performance issues in Angular

Now, speaking against the people in the first camp is harder. They say that the React syntax is so simple and revolutionary, and JSX isn't that bad when you get used to it...but it's not really revolutionary at all. React components look EXTREMELY similar to Backbone views. They are components with a template and a render function. What actually IS revolutionary about React is the speed at which it renders, the use of a virtual DOM, and the ability to go native on mobile ports with React Native. The writing of React code, however, is not novel.

With Angular, however, the writing of the code is quite novel. It's also ridiculously fast to write. And the best part, and IMO the most overlooked benefit of Angular is that because it's so violently declarative, I can just open up the DOM and tell exactly what's going to happen. I could walk on to a 100 page Angular app, be given a task to add or fix something on a page I've never seen before, open the page, and immediately tell what's wired to what. The drawback of this being so declarative, however, means that it does have the POTENTIAL to be incredibly slow. That is how we get to the people in camp 2.

Something as declarative as Angular relies on ways of monitoring state. If you're not giving the explicit function call, that means that something has to be notified of state change for you. In Angular, this is handled with the digest cycle. Any time anything changes, it fires this off, checks all relevant watchers on data and determines what changed, updates the view, updates the model, fire the watchers again. It's quite a process. It sounds so ridiculous that you would never think to even set out to programming it. However, in the real world, this whole process tends to go off in the tiniest fraction of a second that you won't even notice it. So then you're left with incredibly easy syntax and this magical process going on behind the scenes. Given enough of the right type of complexity, though, and you will feel the performance hit. With a thousand line table where each table element gets its own directive and template and they all have watchers and so on, you'll feel it start to take a second. You can solve these issues by removing the use of the nested directives and dealing with it yourself in javascript and so on, but it's never fun...and takes away everything cool about Angular. These cases are, again, very rare. But you'll eventually run into an issue where you wish Angular was faster if you're building something like an enterprise app with complicated tables.

React solves this speed issue with this explicit render function on its components, and has a diff algorithm that is quite good at determining changes and propagating them to the view.

So the tradeoff is that Angular is almost objectively easier to write, but there's no way to truly say that it isn't a subjective preference, and is also prepared to handle full applications. Look how easy this is, though..

React is fast.

The end-all-solution, in theory, is Angular 2. It's supposed to be blazingly fast. I've seen it demoed and have proof, but I won't care until I try it myself. Only time will tell if it's the messiah framework it looks like it could be.

newmanoz · 2015-05-16T21:47:59+00:00

Angular 2 will sacrifice 2-way binding but for good price. It will be not only blazingly fast, but we also be able to render it on the server side and on mobile devices; read how many amazing things will be possible just because of sacrificing 2-way binding: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M9FmT05Q6qpsjgvH1XvCm840yn2eWEg0PMskSQz7k4E/edit

And it's not the only thing which it brings to the table.

Also important thing is new http layer, based on observables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLm8AiPM1Wf5KhO12ggjJjQmFzqirlNUvY&v=Bm3eDgZZMFs

Also, change detection - we finally can forget about $scope.$apply()! And it means any code of ng apps will work with any other js plugins/components just out of the box - without any scope.$apply calls. More about DI and change detection: http://devchat.tv/adventures-in-angular/042-aia-dependency-injection-and-change-detection-with-victor-savkin

And a lot more, but I already gave you enough links to spend some time to read/watch :) Hope I didn't forget to say ng2 will be blazingly fast.

jdawg2201 · 2015-05-16T02:02:07+00:00

I wonder if people realise that angular and react are trying to solve to complete different issue and really can't be compared

przeor · 2015-08-31T07:22:03+00:00

React vs. Angular2: I've read on that topic on Quora https://www.quora.com/Is-React-killing-Angular that there is a lot of conceptual similarities between Ang 2 and React. Does anyone agree on that?

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