Angular NGCC Ivy Compatibility Bridge

Angular NGCC Ivy Compatibility Bridge | Generated by AI

Home 2026.02

Question: What does NGCC in Angular do?

Answer:

NGCC stands for Angular Compatibility Compiler.

It was a tool in Angular (mainly used from Angular 9 to Angular 15) that helped applications using the new Ivy rendering engine consume older Angular libraries that were still compiled with the previous View Engine (the old rendering system before Ivy).

What NGCC actually did:

When you installed an Angular library from npm that was published in View Engine format (common before ~2020–2021),
NGCC would automatically transform that library’s code into Ivy-compatible format during your project’s build (or sometimes post-install via node_modules processing).
This transformation happened by converting the library’s metadata and rendering instructions so Ivy could understand and use them correctly.

Without NGCC, an Ivy-based application would fail to compile or run when depending on a non-Ivy (View Engine) library.

Important historical context:

Angular 9 (2020) → Ivy became the default renderer, but NGCC was added for backward compatibility.
Angular 12 → View Engine was removed from the framework itself (only libraries still needed NGCC).
Angular 16 (May 2023) → NGCC was completely removed.
→ View Engine libraries no longer work at all.
→ All libraries must now be published in Ivy format (most popular libraries have been updated since 2021–2022).

Today (2026)

If you’re using Angular 16 or newer, you no longer see or need NGCC.
If your build fails with messages about View Engine or missing NGCC → it means you’re depending on a very old / unmaintained library that was never migrated to Ivy.
Solution in such cases: update or replace the problematic dependency.

In short:
NGCC was a temporary bridge that allowed a smooth ecosystem transition from View Engine → Ivy between 2020–2023. It is now obsolete and has been removed since Angular 16.

References:

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