React Native for Windows and Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#181

Post by NateEag » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:01 AM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #162

fermienrico wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web has become truly awful and it’s invading desktop apps. We need to refactor our technology stack.

Most native apps I've downloaded are well into tens or hundreds megabytes. I just tried a few big popular sites with caching off and none of them downloaded more than a couple megabytes of javascript. I'm really skeptical of the popular wisdom around here that web dev is doing something especially egregious when it comes to build sizes or dependencies.

The browser is where the hundreds of megabytes vanish to when you use a JS app instead of a native one.

That might still be better (I'm undecided, personally), but it's worth recognizing that heavy native app is still there, just shared with a lot of other JS apps.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#182

Post by int_19h » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

unsignedint wrote: post #60

int_19h wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It... depends. Remember Silverlight?

The last version of Silverlight, Silverlight 5 is actually supported until next year, 10 years after the initial 5.x release, which is not really "short" by any standard. It's mostly the browser's ecosystem moved away from these for more standard based approaches.

"Supported" in a sense of patching security holes, sure. Not so much in a sense of writing new apps in it, or using modern tools to maintain old apps (support was dropped in VS 2017). So in that regard it's very unlike MFC or WinForms, which both enjoy continuous tooling support, and fixes and minor enhancements outside of security.

FWIW, I think your criticism is broadly valid, in that it's more of an exception for Microsoft, but much more common for Google. It's not hard to look at the Windows dev ecosystem, and see which parts of it are very stable, and likely to be around long term - because they have already been around for very long indeed.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#183

Post by eyelidlessness » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

hpen wrote: post #64

chadlavi wrote: post #28

I swear to gosh Facebook, if you tempt my employer into making me write Windows apps...

I would be happy to add Windows as a platform to my apps. More market == more money. Only as an add-on. I wouldn't want to write Windows exclusive apps for sure.

Not meant to disparage, but how lucrative is that market? How much do Windows users (outside of business) actually spend on software (regardless of business model)? It's a leading question, but a sincere one.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#184

Post by zapzupnz » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

I'd love to see some dog-fooding on this. Maybe a branch of VS Code for RN.

I mean, say what you will about the quality of even Apple's own Catalyst apps, but at least they eat their own dogfood (although with the unfortunate consequence of making us eat it, too).

There are so many different competing projects at MS to do practically the same thing, it'd be great to see RN for Windows and macOS used for something major from MS.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#185

Post by hopia » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

wtetzner wrote: post #109

chirau wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by killer exactly? Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.

A killer app is something like Rails. Rails made Ruby popular, because it was so good that people who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in Ruby were willing to use it for the benefits they got from Rails.

Wouldn't Flutter be the killer app to Dart as Rails was to Ruby by your analogy?

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#186

Post by k__ » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

qppo wrote: post #6

I'd love to abandon my C/C++ UI frameworks for React, but I need - consistent rendering/support across multiple platforms and versions - multiple windows - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered or created by the framework Can I do that all in React native? Edit: don't need to bring up electron.

Revery comes to mind here.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#187

Post by eyelidlessness » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:03 AM UTC

wtetzner wrote: post #110

hpen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Not using the DOM for rendering. 2. Integrating native APIs is much easier.

> Being compiled to native code is a huge benefit. It's still just running Javascript. The real difference is that it uses widgets that are native to the platform, instead of a browser engine/DOM.

It's not "just" running JS, it's also running JS. Part of the control flow into and out of the native widgets is JS, and part of it is abstractions over scripting bridges employed by RN (and its various forks).

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#188

Post by diss » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #142

wyc wrote: post #17

React Native scares me with its dependency webs: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native From my experience, it's really great to work with and definitely saves a ton of work, but the depgraph above fills me with doubt for use in sensitive applications such as in finance or healthcare. For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. Perhaps there's some kind of middle…

For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. This says so much about the sad state of modern software development... When native development is a last resort.

I don't think so, if RN or similar is a viable option then it makes far more sense than juggling large Java and Swift implementations of the same app.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#189

Post by int_19h » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

dragonshed wrote: post #168

int_19h wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It... depends. Remember Silverlight?

Ahh, the good ol days. I lost count of how many Xaml-based UI Frameworks got released. In 2011 I started learning web development for UI, almost immediately after Microsoft announced Windows 8 and WinRT at build. This graphic [0] was the writing on the wall. [0] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1555...

To be fair, not all of them were like that. E.g. WPF is very similar to WinForms, in that it doesn't see any major new features, but there's constant ongoing maintenance (including fairly big items, such as getting it to run on .NET Core), and all the development tooling is fully supported as well.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#190

Post by dgentile » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

gitgud wrote: post #115

yesimahuman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be careful with Flutter’s web port. It’s going to be a pretty divergent approach in terms of web dev familiarity, bundle size, and compatibility with native web features (they had to implement copy and paste from scratch, for example). It is very similar to the approach Famous took back when. It is not looked kindly upon by many web platform advocates I know.

The Flutter web port is ridiculous. It circumvents the entire point of a Web page as it's literally just a canvas on the Web page. You lose all advantages that HTML and CSS gives you, links, styling, accessibility, text selection! ... It's basically a flash website... Which admittedly is okay for some applications

Is it WebGL?