Live data from Hacker News

React Native at Instagram

engineering.instagram.com

161–170 of 238 posts

Re: React Native at Instagram

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the post, very interesting! The post talks about the percentage of the code shared between iOS and Android. Is there any shared code with the web as well, or is that a completely separate react app?

Although the Instagram website is a React App we are not reusing any code atm. This is something I personally want to explore at some point though.

How much code can be shared between React (web) and React Native?

Edit: Answered in other comment below. Share logic, no UI.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#162

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the Android/iOS code sharing nut was cracked: Business logic in C or C++ and UI in Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android + NDK). As a bonus, you could bolt a desktop UI on top of the C++ as well.

That's what we're doing, only using Go

Re: React Native at Instagram

#164
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why can't Google create a new version of the dex format, update Android Studio to generate it, and update the store to accept and distribute it to new devices? Seems easy enough for Google to be able to do.

Because of their clever idea of not forcing OEMs to update devices, almost no one will get that.

The best time to ship support for an updated format was five years ago. The second-best time is today.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#165
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, and most of what is written there I find correct. Wouldn't go as far as the Flash stuff. Mostly, it's down to the terrible web ecosystem and JS. Feds love it, but they don't know better. Native developers do, and most of the ones I've worked with have suffered a mental toll on having to work with RN. Now, is it an understandable from a management standpoint? Sure, especially at a company like Facebook, where…

Feds? Dude, I've been developing on the iOS platform since 2011 and Android not much later than that. I've developed in Xamarin, and RN has a MUCH better development toolchain and dev experience. I really don't understand the JS hate. I'm using typescript for RN development and I have had 0 problems so far. JS/TS dev velocity is just so much better than ObjC/Java. Swift is a huge step in the right direction.

Sure, but I would use anything over Xamarin. So buggy, so many crashes, so little support, such slow apps.

And I have tried MVVMCross and forms.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#166
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think having an OS available for free was more relevant.

Yeah, it's not like Samsung can go make iOS phones. And I highly doubt any of these hardware OEMs could possibly pull off a software project that doesn't suck, let alone a whole OS and dev ecosystem.

Samsung already releases phones running Tizen to have a side bet against Android. The quality of software is not very important when your only competitor builds phones that are significantly more expensive.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#168
This is a bad sign to me, talks about how to optimise start up performance and optimise list views when the processors in our pockets are the fastest they've ever been.

Do we really have to switch to developer centric development where devs have an easier life using JS at the expense of performance?

Think the millions of users would prefer their devices to have better battery life, load faster and have less cruft just to draw a few text boxes of a profile edit screen or a grid of photos (something I would have thought would be effortless to mobile devs in 2017). Rather than the handful of devs having a slightly easier day at the start of the process.

This whole move seems especially strange to me coming from a Facebook company, have we forgotten the move from native > webtech > native already?

Re: React Native at Instagram

#169
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's not like Samsung can go make iOS phones. And I highly doubt any of these hardware OEMs could possibly pull off a software project that doesn't suck, let alone a whole OS and dev ecosystem.

Samsung already releases phones running Tizen to have a side bet against Android. The quality of software is not very important when your only competitor builds phones that are significantly more expensive.

Tizen is a joke for app developers, it was already rebooted so many times, no one serious would spend a second trying to target the platform.

1 - Meego reborn as Tizen

2 - Tizen gets the Bada C++ SDK, with its Symbian C++ like flavour

3 - Enlightment guys join Tizen

4 - C++ SDK gets kicked out and replaced by Enlightment C libraries

5 - Developers complain that Tizen 2.3 drops C++ and is a C only experience

6 - Samsung announces support for .NET Core as high level native Tizen tooling

Really, what SDK are they going to release next?!

Re: React Native at Instagram

#170
post #113
post #3

I'm getting tired of having to allow scripts to even get to see the images. Why dont they use tags?

There's a lot of software developers who like to over-engineer things. Some are probably working at Medium.

At times I feel filling the building with just a few too many smart people can sometimes cause a regression on experience as things are over engineered and too many people struggle to find smarter solutions to solved problems.

Take Google Maps for example, the old tile based version is blazing fast and uses almost no CPU. "Modern" version of Maps makes my MacBook Pro fans turn on almost straight away, chugs and chokes when dragging and although the zoom motion is clearer the actual data display isn't any better.

Post reply on HN