Why Angular and React Are Essentially the Same Framework – Insights from Google

“Angular and React are essentially the same framework,” says Minko Gechev, the Angular product lead at Google, speaking at the dotJS conference.

This bold claim challenges the JavaScript community, where developers are often encouraged to build their own frameworks. While Angular uses classes and templates and React uses functions and JSX, both provide the same fundamental capabilities.

Gechev notes that a large part of any front‑end framework’s job is to keep the model and view in sync, and the way Angular and React achieve this is remarkably similar.

Tasked by Google’s R&D team, Gechev is leading an unprecedented effort to fuse two JavaScript frameworks: Angular and Google’s internal Wiz framework. He explains what this means for web developers and the future of frameworks.

Gechev says that merging two different frameworks is something he has never heard of before. The experience clarified what web frameworks are made of and revealed many similarities across frameworks, showing how they converge on shared implementations over time.

Both React and Angular keep the component tree synchronized with the UI through a process often called reactivity or state propagation. When a state changes, React uses hooks, while Angular relies on zone.js. The frameworks traverse the component tree, detect differences, and apply updates to the DOM.

He illustrates this with a shopping‑cart example: a user profile component displays a username, and a cart component iterates over items, showing quantities. When the cart’s state changes (e.g., the quantity of the first item becomes 1), both Angular and React run very similar change‑detection and reconciliation algorithms, walking the tree from the root to the profile component.

Benchmark data shows that while both frameworks struggle with full‑page transitions, they excel at partial updates. Gechev notes that real‑world applications may have hundreds or thousands of active components, making efficient change detection crucial.

To improve reactivity, Angular introduced static dependency tracking and added Signals in Angular 16. Signals are reactive primitives that automatically track where they are used, invalidating dependent computations when the underlying value changes. Other frameworks such as Ember, Solid, Vue, and Svelte have also adopted Signals.

Use‑Case Convergence

Gechev compares the internal Wiz framework’s use cases to those of Astro and Qwik, which target highly performance‑sensitive consumer apps like Google Search or YouTube, whereas Angular has traditionally served enterprise‑grade clients such as Google Cloud and Analytics. Over time, the requirements of these domains are converging.

“You can see that all these frameworks are now focusing on the same reactive primitive—Signals.” — Minko Gechev, Google Engineering Product Lead

The Signals primitive opened the door for fusion: the Wiz team wanted to add Signals to Angular, while the Angular team was interested in Wiz’s ten‑year‑old recoverability concept, later adopted by Qwik.

Gechev’s team integrated Signals into the mobile YouTube experience, achieving a 35 % performance boost on smart‑TV devices.

There is also a proposal to add Signals to the JavaScript language itself: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-signals . The proposal is at stage 1, and the reference implementation uses Angular Signals because they have proven to work across multiple frameworks.

Potential Fusion in Other Areas

Gechev warns that merging frameworks is not easy and may require extensive changes and stability considerations. However, internal testing of the Wiz/Angular fusion at Google has not broken any of the roughly 4,500 Angular applications in their monorepo.

He describes how Angular developers open pull requests that sync source code to a central monorepo, running exhaustive tests across millions of lines of code to ensure backward compatibility.

“When choosing a framework, don’t overthink it. In the end, it’s the same technology with a different appearance.” — Minko Gechev

Gechev predicts that event replay and fine‑grained code loading could also converge, referencing Google’s work on bridging the gap between server‑rendered structure and interactive client behavior. The team is modernising a library called JS Action (or Event Dispatch) and moving it into the Angular monorepo.

He explains that developers can now download only the minimal JavaScript needed for a specific user interaction, rather than the whole application, by using “lazy views” (also called delayed views). This approach enables partial hydration islands and event replay without losing clicks.

Impact on Angular

What does this mean for Angular and web developers? Gechev says it’s part of a gradual improvement process, where Angular adopts best‑practice primitives from the broader ecosystem.

Although some argue the frameworks are too different—React lacks dependency injection, Angular lacks a context API—both ultimately serve the same purpose: injecting data into components, either via Angular’s dependency injection or React’s context API, and they share very similar data structures.

Developer Takeaways

Chrome chief engineer Addy Osmani published a table comparing features across frameworks at Google I/O 2024. Gechev updated the table to reflect his view that frameworks are converging on the same capabilities.

He advises developers to prioritize stability, reliability, a supportive ecosystem, and personal enjoyment when choosing a framework.

Author: 万能的大雄 References: https://www.dotjs.io/ https://thenewstack.io/google-angular-lead-sees-convergence-in-javascript-frameworks/