Lots more work to do here, but we're pretty happy with how the core looks! For those worried about size (which has absolutely been a fair concern over the alpha/beta process) - here's a "hello world" built with Rollup and our offline template precompilation. Clocks in at 200kb min/47k gzipped, with a bit more room from optimization over the next couple of weeks... https://ng2-compiler-test2.firebaseapp.com/
(yes, I know it's not the same under the covers - take it as a comment on the ecosystem, not on the implementation (although it can be a comment on dead code detection too))
I see a lot of complaints about toy app size/complexity. There's definitely a judgement call to makes about app complexity when someone starts a project with a framework. I inevitably find that development in the middle/end of the project is substantially easier when using a good setup like React/Redux/etc or Angular, and changes are easier to make, whereas vanilla development is (relatively) substantially easier at the beginning of a project.
Yeah, Hello World might be expensive in size, but when you've got a substantially complex and fast app for not much more size, you start to feel the real benefits.
But what is Angular doing with that 200k (which is minified)? It doesn't seem like I should need to pull in the whole of Angular to make a component with a template.
Granted, React is pretty big too, but other frameworks, like Riot.js, have shown that they can be much smaller. Then there's Polymer which gets smaller as web components roll out.
In the competition again native apps, web apps have to load really, really fast. Their ability to run without installation is an advantage that needs to be maximized, an on potentially slow and high-latency mobile networks.
FYI they said at today's ng-conf sessions that with the recent release candidate, they have cut that from 200K to 40K and that there's still more room to shrink.
The new npm packages have an ES6 directory included and use the jsnext:main pointer in their package.json files to allow rollup-plugin-node-resolve to pick up the ES6 distro as normal. I'll drop a note in that issue later this week after I've gotten some sleep!
