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React Native at Airbnb

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Re: React Native at Airbnb

#111

Post by woolvalley »

SneakerXZ wrote: post #40
woolvalley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xamarin and co suffer from the same dual layer issues that react native has when I last looked into it. C# isn't that popular from a silicon valley engineering perspective, since the first class C# implementation wasn't open source until very recently. Yes mono has always be OSS, but it has also been a second class citizen too.

Only Xamarin.Forms introduces another layer for you (it is the same concept as React Native). If you use Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android you call underlying APIs directly. Although there can be issues with bindings, nothing like you will face with React Native. I am aware of why C# isn't popular among startups. It is sad because C# is a great language that has amazing tooling support. It runs everywhere - Xamarin for…

Even with Xamarin.Android/iOS I read about unique bugs that resulted in you needing to be an expert in both layers to understand. And bugs in the wrapper themselves.

It's a problem with the entire design type, which has been shown throughout computing history to not work that well.

And why use C# when the Java ecosystem is pretty much the same tooling wise? C# feels like a 1.2x better Java, which isn't enough.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#112

Post by eropple »

chii wrote: post #80
RussianCow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't disagree with your premise, "need to be an expert at both layers" is absolutely still true if you build your app natively for each platform (more so, even). At least with a common platform, if nothing else, you can share quite a bit of code, and that alone might make it worth the extra layers.

But the draw of cross platform is that you don't need to be an expert in them! Or at least, that's the advertised advantage.

For the happy path, you don't. And many apps can stick very comfortably on the happy path. I wrote a controller for a video mixer[0] that ran out-of-the-box on Android and iOS using websockets and everything Just Worked. (I still haven't released the iOS version due to lack of test equipment, but it runs just fine.)

[0] - http://bit.ly/buymyapp

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#113

Post by weka »

Reedx wrote: post #82
jaequery wrote: post #79

well, its unfortunate that React Native didn't work for them. i think RN is great solution and direction for mobile in general. sure it can be improved but at the moment, it is the best we have for cross-platform mobile development.

Have you tried Flutter? That's looking promising.

Yeah... but... dart.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#114

Post by chengyinliu »

kbyatnal wrote: post #16

"While debugging, React Native attaches to a Chrome Developer Tools instance. This is great because it is a powerful debugger. However, once the debugger is attached, all JavaScript runs within Chrome’s V8 engine. This is fine 99.9% of the time. However, in one instance, we got bit when toLocaleString worked on iOS and but only worked on Android while debugging. It turns out that the Android JSC doesn’t include it an…

Thanks for pointing this out. This part was my experience and as you said, it was quite frustrating. Overall the RN experience made me more skeptical about thing I usually take for granted.

It really shows how hard it is for RN to work cross platform. Each abstraction layer can bring in some new problems.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#115

Post by apahwa »

crabl wrote: post #110

Tangential to this, he says Airbnb has 100 mobile devs writing about 80k LoC of app code, 40K LoC of infra, and 220 "screens". We've got an app with about the same "dimensions", developed in a similar timeframe, with some very complex financial business logic and 2 developers working on it... what on Earth do their devs spend their time on? Is their engineering organization really _that_ inefficient?

"For reference, we have about 10x the amount of code and 4x the number of screens on each native platform". So the amount of code and the complexity is substantially more difficult than you describe. You probably also don't have as rigorous AB testing, logging, internationalization, contributions to open source, etc.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#116

Post by pgsandstrom »

crabl wrote: post #110

Tangential to this, he says Airbnb has 100 mobile devs writing about 80k LoC of app code, 40K LoC of infra, and 220 "screens". We've got an app with about the same "dimensions", developed in a similar timeframe, with some very complex financial business logic and 2 developers working on it... what on Earth do their devs spend their time on? Is their engineering organization really _that_ inefficient?

In my experience, in such a large and "app-centric" company the requirements on the app is changing constantly. Just having a specification that you implement is a hundred times easier than building a constantly evolving target.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#117

Post by apahwa »

samfisher83 wrote: post #69
melvinram wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resources, even at a semi-large company, are finite. Teams have limited head counts and usually an ever increasing list of asks from Product team. Being efficient is not optional.

Lets do a little math. FB has 25k employees. Lets suppose they pay everyone a million buck. That is 25billion. Their gross profits were 35 billion. They can afford to have two teams or 3 teams or 4 teams working on the app. I don't know what Airbnb's numbers are, but I am sure they can afford to have multiple teams.

I can't tell if you are trolling or not.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#118

Post by [deleted] »

crabl wrote: post #110

Tangential to this, he says Airbnb has 100 mobile devs writing about 80k LoC of app code, 40K LoC of infra, and 220 "screens". We've got an app with about the same "dimensions", developed in a similar timeframe, with some very complex financial business logic and 2 developers working on it... what on Earth do their devs spend their time on? Is their engineering organization really _that_ inefficient?

[deleted]

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#119

Post by ascorbic »

danabramov wrote: post #33
eysquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. Doing so while working across organizations that may or may not use react-native is doubly so. Sometimes this boils down to the technology, knowledge, and the engineering systems needed to support both but I've also found native developers tend to strongly dislike react-native and lobby against whenever they can. For me, I'm using it to successfu…

>The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. We've experienced some of the difficulties in this area at Facebook as well. If you're curious, making native JS integration more seamless is a big motivation for the ongoing architectural revamp that we've recently posted about: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state... It's a shame we weren't fast enough to help Airbnb in…

I did find it ironic while reading it that most of their pain was related to mixing React Native with a large, existing native app, yet that's exactly how you're using it at Facebook. I'm interested to watch how you get on in fixing this.

In my use we've hardly met any of those problems. I work for an agency, and the apps we've used it for are small or medium sized. All are new apps without legacy native components, and none of them mix RN with native outside of plugins. We also use 100% TypeScript now, which fixes a lot of their error-checking issues. Perhaps most importantly, I'm one of the few developers with significant native experience, so we're not encountering the cultural problems that they describe in the posts, of developers resistant to using the tech.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#120

Post by [deleted] »

crabl wrote: post #110

Tangential to this, he says Airbnb has 100 mobile devs writing about 80k LoC of app code, 40K LoC of infra, and 220 "screens". We've got an app with about the same "dimensions", developed in a similar timeframe, with some very complex financial business logic and 2 developers working on it... what on Earth do their devs spend their time on? Is their engineering organization really _that_ inefficient?

[deleted]
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