[padolsey]

Even comparing Backbone (by itself) to these two is futile. It's thin, doesn't prescribe much, and doesn't even promise to offer what Emb/Ang do, so to compare them is unfair to all involved IMHO.

I'm reluctant to try something big with Angular because of its insistence on dirty checking, which just ends up being an annoyingly leaky abstraction half the time (see $timeout, for example).

[Nitramp]

I've written large applications in AngularJS, the dirty checking is generally not a problem. If you write complex directives that need to pass non-trivial data structures around, you have to know what you're doing, but it still works fine.

I don't get your reference to $timeout - $timeout is Angular's more testable wrapper around setTimeout for an asynchronous operation. AFAICT it's entirely unrelated to dirty checking - sometimes you just want something to happen later. Am I missing something?

[minznerjosh]

I think that one of the most important features of $timout is that it runs a digest cycle after the timeout completes. That's why bindings get updated when you modify data in a $timout callback. So it is related to dirty checking.