React Native at Instagram • Hacker News Board

Re: React Native at Instagram

#181

Post by kayoone » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:27 PM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #146

bennyg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing that out, forgot my old site was still in the profile. What do you mean by feds? That's still a very confusing statement. Switched off of Xamarin about 8 months ago and haven't looked back. My organization had a ton of problems with Xamarin, without honestly that much gain at all. We still needed specific devs for Android and iOS. Sharing component and state code has been an absolute boon in produ…

We are using Xamarin for our mobile apps and around 90% of .NET code is shared between both platforms. The platform specific code is basically just UI related, which makes sense given the different approaches to some UI mechanics in iOS vs Android. Also leveraging the huge .NET Ecosystem which in general has quite high quality and superb tools for development and debugging is a big plus. We are also starting to use .…

can some1 explain why i get downvoted for what i think was a constructive comment describing my personal experience ? Is it just Xamarin/MS hate ?

Re: React Native at Instagram

#182

Post by martin_bigio » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:38 PM UTC

gigatexal wrote: post #140

This is probably stupid but does react native compile down to the running environment? Code in react and then build/compile against iOS SDKs?

JS code run on JSC, bridge modules are implemented on objc/java

Re: React Native at Instagram

#183

Post by martin_bigio » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:42 PM UTC

kartickv wrote: post #128

martin_bigio wrote: post #4

@martinbigio here in case anyone has questions

Thanks, Martin, for appearing here. I've read a few times that apps developed in React Native have an odd look-and-feel, or had noticeable touch latency, or aren't performant enough or native-quality. Every time I tried an app built using a hybrid framework, it felt second-tier. Has that been your experience? When you moved any UI from UIKit or native Android views to React Native, was it worse in any way? Did it req…

I've only seen such thing on infinite non-optimized listviews on old Android crappy phones, but, new listview infra that solves this is coming up soon :)

Re: React Native at Instagram

#184

Post by martin_bigio » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:44 PM UTC

SilverWhiskey wrote: post #167

Argh, now I see why I can't change anything on the Push Notifications settings page. Nice experiment, Instagram, but could you please fix it and let me disable all notifications within the app, not iphone settings?

what's the problem? If it's a generic error message that's s server-side issue unrelated to RN the team is working on fixing.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#185

Post by martin_bigio » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:46 PM UTC

steeve wrote: post #162

ryandrake wrote: post #99

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

couldn't agree more with @realharo. IMHO C++ step learning curve is a no-go for product dev.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#186

Post by joe_momma » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:48 PM UTC

React Native is becoming the Wordpress of mobile apps.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#187

Post by martin_bigio » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:49 PM UTC

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #61

Please speak, if you can, on the mental toll the move to web ecosystem has taken on your native developers that have until now developed on respective native ecosystems. In particularly, I refer to having to work in JS, having to install tens if not hundreds if not thousands npm dependencies in order to do the most routine tasks, having to restart packager and clear cache every few runs, etc.

Packager has gotten pretty stable lately, you shouldn't need to restart it anymore. In regards npm modules, you only need to do so when upgrading dependencies which doesn't happen that often.

We also use yarn, an npm client FB built from the ground up to removes some of the pain with npm's one: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1840075619545360

Re: React Native at Instagram

#188

Post by menckenjr » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:51 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #99

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.

If you really want code sharing without javascript you might try embedding Lua or Go (Google has a project called go mobile that generates android and iOS frameworks from Go projects).

Re: React Native at Instagram

#189

Post by sotojuan » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 12:55 PM UTC

intoverflow2 wrote: post #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 jus…

Welcome to programming with web technologies!

Re: React Native at Instagram

#190

Post by whatever_dude » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:07 PM UTC

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #63

what2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a big plus for React Native. What are the negatives you have found?

One big negative for me so far is that you can't go the last mile (sometimes even the first) if you don't already know a lot about both iOS and Android development. I've written an app with Cordova and never really touched xcode or did anything specific for each platform. Also, every library (addon/plugin/whatever) I've tried to use so far has not been even close to up to date with the current version of RN. Error me…

> One big negative for me so far is that you can't go the last mile ... if you don't already know a lot about both iOS and Android development

To me it's actually one of the strongest points of RN. It's not trying to shun away the build/custom native wrapper part in favor of a magical solution; instead, it's giving you full control and full power on how you want things done.

Things like Cordova have been easy and great for simple stuff, but anything that is a little bit different or needs real performance is impossible or extremely problematic to achieve. Not on RN. It can be difficult, as creating a custom native UI requires a lot of knowledge of both native platforms, and a lot of boilerplate. But the end result is superior in every way to what HTML wrappers can do.

Rather than RN being a solution of one-size-fits-all like what some platforms want to be, I look at it from another angle: it still requires native mobile devs with native knowledge, but offloads 90% of the UI/business logic effort to this one universal platform. That's what most no-compromise cross-platform apps need.