Why would I want to do it?

Compiling your application ahead of time is beneficial for the following reasons:

• We no longer have to ship the compiler to the client. And so it happens, the compiler is the largest part of the framework. So it has a positive effect on the download size.
• Since the compiled app does not have any HTML and instead has the generated TypeScript code, the TypeScript compiler can analyze it to produce type errors. In other words, your templates are type safe.
• Bundlers (for example, WebPack and Rollup) can tree shake away everything that is not used in the application. This means that you no longer have to create 50-line node modules to reduce the download size of your application. The bundler will figure out which components are used, and the rest will be removed from the bundle.
• Finally, since the most expensive step in the bootstrap of your application is the compilation, compiling ahead of time can significantly improve the bootstrap time.

To sum up, using the AOT compilation makes your application bundles smaller, faster, and safer.