By Paul Krill
Google has announced plans to eventually merge its Angular and Wiz web frameworks. The company says it is already looking for ways that Angular could benefit from Wiz's superior performance, while Wiz could benefit from Angular's focus on developer experience.
In a blog post posted by the Angular team on March 30, proponents said that Angular and Wiz were “better together.” The merge will happen "gradually and responsibly" over the coming years, according to the post. Google’s strategy is to steadily open-source Wiz features via Angular and follow an open model of development. A public RFC (request for comment) process will ensure community feedback is gathered on relevant proposed features. The primary goal of the merge is to improve the Angular framework.
Historically, Wiz has focused on performance-critical apps such as Google Search while Angular was geared toward highly interactive applications, prioritizing developer experience and fast delivery of complex UIs. Examples of Angular usage are Gemini, used for accessing Google AI, and Google Analytics. Both Angular and Wiz have been used by thousands of apps inside Google.
The partnership between Angular and Wiz manifests Google’s mission to enable developers to build web apps with confidence. Angular updates such as deferrable views and an exploration of partial hydration were both inspired by Wiz’s fine-grained code loading and event delegation library. Wiz, meanwhile, adopted Angular’s Signals library, which now powers YouTube's user interface. The partial hydration is happening later this year.
Angular currently is at version 17.3, featuring an improved API for declaring outputs. The capability is in a developer preview and provides a simpler and safer API for declaring outputs in directives. Angular 17 was released last November, while Angular 18 is planned for release in May.
