[couchand]

I've been doing a fair amount of Angular development at work and recently been getting into React on the side (and now introducing it for a new project at work!). I'd say they have the same general goal - build your app with declarative and expressive markup. However, Angular tries to shoehorn custom components into the regular DOM, which gets problematic in many cases.

For instance: the directives `ng-show` and `ng-hide` simply apply CSS styles. As far as I know it's not possible to completely remove an Angular component from the DOM and then replace it later (without getting too deep into imperative JS). However, that's trivial to do in React.

Angular chokes on large data sets, probably because it's doing everything directly on the DOM. React handles huge numbers of records effortlessly. Getting comparable performance with Angular requires much more imperative voodoo than I'd like out of an ostensibly declarative system.

I also find it harder to reason about Angular's data flow, since there are many ways to pass things around: nested scope, isolate scope, sibling scope, same scope, dependency injection to name a few. Finding where a particular handler or value comes from is sometimes quite the hunt. With React, it's all pretty much self-contained.

[optymizer]

> As far as I know it's not possible to completely remove an Angular component from the DOM

Wouldn't ng-if be appropriate for this?

[couchand]

Ah yes, that's exactly what `ng-if` is for. Thanks for pointing that out. The only downside is that it creates another nested scope, which can be surprising.