The angular core team has mentioned that they may have overstated the performance gains of Object.observe(). I don't think there'll be as large performance gain

The angular core team has mentioned that they may have overstated the performance gains of Object.observe(). I don't think there'll be as large performance gains as people think. Even once it's widely available, it'll probably take a long time to optimize. There's a discussion about it here: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/3601 https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/3601 On a personal note, after using angular for around two years... You can write good angular code, but in my experience, a lot of people (especially libraries) are writing really bad stuff. I've been playing around with this whole Flux+React ecosystem and I'm starting to think the patterns it presents are more sensible. On top of that, this whole magic of two-way data-binding is certainly cool and fun, but I noticed that for most cases I know exactly when a value is changing, so notifying of a change manually is not a big deal (even if it's more work, it usually brings good performance). I'd be really happy if angular had a built-in way of doing something like event-based bindings. Right now we have regular bindings, and one-time bindings. I want a way to bind to a property where it'll wait for the property to stabilize and then remove the watcher unless I manually notify it that it changed. So here's a trivial example: let's say I have a Stack Overflow styled app. When I open a post, it'll load the title, question, and answers. Now I could use one-time bindings so the title and question aren't being watched anymore. But I know that after loading this page I could receive a websocket notification that the title has been updated. I'm going to have to keep a watcher on the title even though it can only change in that one condition! It'd be great to just have something built in to handle this. (And I can think of many ways to solve this, such as making my own directive in which I add a listener for an event and then update it manually; but it'd be great if we had a built-in solution.)