Ng-News 26/22: TypeScript 7.1, Angular Native and Polymorpheus

Angular's compiler together with TypeScript 7.1, and Angular Native for mobile development. Plus: Polymorpheus for adaptable UI components and a look at conferences coming up.

Compiler in Angular and TypeScript 7.1

TypeScript does not compile Angular code directly. That job belongs to the Angular compiler, which is layered on top of TypeScript.

The current release is TypeScript 7, and it is the first one ported to Go. Compilation is promised to be as much as 10 times faster. A shift of that size in TypeScript inevitably ripples through the Angular compiler as well.

Angular's compiler relies on TypeScript's programmatic API, importing and using it the way you would any library. TypeScript 7.0 ships without a programmatic API, but it stays compatible with TypeScript 6, so the TypeScript 6 programmatic API remains usable. So far, no trouble.

Angular pulls TypeScript in as a library and invokes its programmatic API. Simplified.

TypeScript 7.1 is expected to introduce a new programmatic API, and Angular will need it to run on 7.1.

Here is the catch. Angular's compiler is written in TypeScript, yet it now has to reach a compiler written in Go, which creates a language boundary. The new interop API resolves that, but it arrives without the TypeScript transformer API that Angular depends on to rewrite our code.

For that reason Angular will turn to another widely adopted tool: Oxc, written in Rust and already in use by Vite and various other popular tools. Put simply, Angular applies Oxc across its individual steps to analyze our code and set up compilation tasks. Angular has two main pipelines — one that prepares our code by transforming it into its final form, and one that runs the type-check on templates — and both ends gain from the added speed.

Simplified view of the two compiler paths, adapted from the episode animation.

As of this writing, the PR has already landed on main, so a version of it may ship as early as Angular 22.3.

Angular compiler PR

Angular Native

Building native mobile apps has never been especially pleasant for Angular developers. Ionic exists, but it relies on a WebView as an intermediate layer to render web UI. NativeScript does produce genuinely native UI for Android and iOS. What we lacked was something comparable to React Native, with its production-proven Fabric renderer and an ecosystem like Expo that covers the entire development lifecycle.

That changed on 29 September, when Ashley Hunter released Angular Native, which has since drawn a growing number of contributors. It is an independent community project and currently in alpha.

The good news is that its native rendering is not written from scratch — it leverages React Native underneath. That works because React Native's Fabric rendering infrastructure can be driven independently of React. In a normal React Native app, React's reconciler figures out the changes to the component tree and hands the rendering work to Fabric. Angular Native drives Fabric without React's component tree or reconciler.

Ashley Hunter took advantage of that separation and swapped Angular's DOM-targeting renderer for a native renderer built on React Native's Fabric. Replacing the renderer with a non-DOM target is nothing new — Chau Tran takes the same route in Angular Three.

The framework layer changes; Fabric and the native UI layers stay put. Simplified.

In practice this means we build on a production-proven native renderer that is well maintained, with Angular Native on top integrating Angular through its official renderer extension points. The integration itself is still in alpha, though.

Because it is native rather than DOM — again, Ionic uses a WebView — we cannot simply reuse existing components or UI libraries that depend on the browser. Native UI requires native components. Familiar tags such as div and p do work, but they map to native views and text. There is one exception: dom-component lets us embed existing Angular web components, though that part then runs in a WebView. The logic itself can stay as long as it does not depend on browser APIs.

Angular Native also went beyond the basics by integrating Tailwind, the Angular router, hot reload, and a testing library. It supports the React Native build environment with the bundler Metro and Expo, which is roughly what Nx or the Angular CLI is to Angular, but goes further with cloud builds, app-store submission, and updates. So Angular doesn't just run on top of React Native — it also opens access to that ecosystem of native modules and tooling. React components and hooks, however, don't simply work in Angular.

Polymorpheus

When you design a UI library meant for general use, you have to cover many different scenarios, and that gets complicated quickly. An input might begin as a plain string. Then a caller needs a function that receives the context for that particular use. Or your users want to render full HTML — or even an entire component. Consider a tooltip: initially a simple title may be enough, but once you use that tooltip inside a loop you need access to the current element, or you want specific formatting.

As the author of that tooltip, a great deal of work goes into the component to make it fit as many use cases as possible.

Alex Inkin is a lead developer behind Taiga UI, and these kinds of challenges are his daily business, so to speak. Alex published an article on Angular Space discussing his library Polymorpheus, which is optimized precisely for such challenges, is used inside Taiga UI, and is available for us as well.

Official Polymorpheus repository

Conferences on the horizon

NG Poland - 17 November 2026, Warsaw.

angularday - 20 November 2026, Verona.

Aingular TLV - 7 December 2026, Tel Aviv.

NG Switzerland - 11-12 February 2027, Lucerne area.

NG Baguette - 28 May 2027, Paris.