[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.