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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Good marketing in this space is also about leading by example and eating your dog food.

Facebook used React internally before releasing it. Every new web front-end at Meta is written in React. They also had a convincing story of how the runtime expands beyond the web (React Native etc.)

With Angular, you’d be hard-pressed to name a Google service built using it. It seems to be a framework created condescendingly for the ordinary others, not the Mountain View geniuses themselves. That’s not great marketing.

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I’m sorry but that’s just not true. You can check this page to get a pretty extensive list of Google products made with angular https://www.madewithangular.com/categories/google/

I clicked through to a bunch of the websites and a lot of them have since abandoned Angular.

It says AdWords is built on Angular. But I think it is built using dart version, which is very separate thing?

AdWords was built with Angular Dart

The Google Cloud Console is the most notable Google service built with Angular and my experience is that's one of the best advertisements for not using Angular. If even Google engineers theoretically just offices away from the Angular team can't make a performant Angular app, who can?

The Angular Team act like it's a great feature that they don't give "special" support to in-house dogfooding teams, but that just leaves as much an impression that they'd rather just support everyone equally bad. Sure "no special support" sounds great on paper, but it certainly looks like "no support at all" from where I'm standing.

Some Angular proponents will also make excuses that the Google Cloud Console is an amalgamation of components and pages owned by a variety of different teams, like that's a unique situation to Google that no one else deals with bureaucratic scale like that. I guess they haven't experienced much other enterprise development, because that is very common in my experience. If they aren't building Angular for multi-team enterprise applications, what exactly are they building it for? (They are certainly advertising Angular as great for those, even if they are using it as an excuse for why Angular isn't performing well in Google's own usage of Angular.)

I like how people make this jab at angular without acting like Facebooks site is so god awful. If react is so great why is the Facebook site terrible?

Large companies have large company issues regardless of front end framework.

Facebook's site is awful, but performance, and specifically the performance of React on Facebook if I feel like watching profiling reports in Dev Tools, is rarely ever my complaint with Facebook's site. (When I have noticed performance issues with Facebook they were network/backend issues, not front end issues.) Facebook seem to have some pretty aggressive performance goals, meet them more often than not, and React seems to benefit well from that dogfooding (as release notes have sometimes mentioned that performance improvements were driven by Facebook's needs).

Anecdotally, having to profile the performance of apps I've built on Angular and React I'd much rather be profiling a React app than Angular any day of the week. I got so frustrated with Zone.js at one point I wrote an entire "Component Framework" for Angular to avoid Zone.js as much as possible and try to remove Zone.js entirely as a dependency in Angular apps that I need to profile.

At ng-conf like 2-3 years ago they said that they use angular for over 2000 internal projects at google.

It’s ok sometimes to admit that you just don’t know rather than to make things up out of thin air.

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