Angular Signals — Everything You Need To Know

Angular Signals is the new change detection revolution for the Angular framework.

And developers are lovin it.

A few folks seem to be disgruntled at the new direction. Some folks just don’t like ground-breaking changes.

But the Angular team has affirmed their commitment to backward compatibility, and ran an entire RFC on Angular Signals before releasing the new Angular signal changes. So it’s entirely up to you whether or not you embrace the new change detection system. Zone.js is still around and will be for awhile.

But why Angular signals? Why a new change detection system?

The reason for Angular signals is simple — improve change detection performance.

Signals allow the Angular framework to optimize change detection performance. Plus they’re a lightweight dependency — 2KB to be exact.

This is a really sweet deal if you’ve got a large Angular enterprise app that requires lots of client rendering.

So, today, I’m going to show you everything you need to know about Angular signals.

Let’s get into it by starting off with a bit of history.

How did we get here?

The Angular framework is dependent upon it’s change detection mechanism. Change detection is how Angular updates the UI in the browser when the state in the app changes.

As Misko (the original creator of Angular) famously said, back in the day when Zone.js was the new change detection system, it supposedly was the bees knees.

Well, Misko, if Zones was the bees knees then what are Angular Signals now? 😀 😀