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React Native for Windows and Mac

microsoft.github.io

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Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#241

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Flutter on desktop has been "right around the corner" for about 5 years now.

But Flutter didn't come out until 2017?

Not for iOS and for the public, but Google had been talking about and demoing for a long time before that.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#242
post #206

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You might be misinformed; according to https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-... Flutter for Web uses HTML & CSS where it can, and falls back to Canvas where it can't. Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.

Well that article is from 2018 and kind of overemphasises the HTML and CSS where it can. Checkout the official [1] Flutter web demos. Even the simplest [2] example renders basically every part of the UI (including text!!) within canvas elements, which is a bit crazy to me... but yes it's still Beta, so we'll see what they can improve [1] https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web [2] https://flutter.github.io/s…

Wow that's pretty insane. I can't select any text on any of those examples, I can't open anything in a new tab, and I can't save any images.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#243

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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.

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Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#244
post #59

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Speaking of trusting trust, I think I'd love for Node¹ to support something like OpenBSD pledge (2) and unveil (2) for imports, where once you enter into a particular package certain capabilities are disabled. I would like to be able to assert that when I import some package, it and all of the packages it recursively includes do not perform network requests, do not use the filesystem outside of some folder, and so on…

> A fine grained capability system for packages would dramatically improve the safety profile I think Deno does that (the new project by Node's original creator): https://blog.logrocket.com/what-is-deno/

Deno gives all packages the same permissions of the main app. So if your app can make network requests, so can every dependency you use. It’s not a great situation. I’ve brought this up to them and their response is that per-package permissions would be too difficult to implement.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#245
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that article is from 2018 and kind of overemphasises the HTML and CSS where it can. Checkout the official [1] Flutter web demos. Even the simplest [2] example renders basically every part of the UI (including text!!) within canvas elements, which is a bit crazy to me... but yes it's still Beta, so we'll see what they can improve [1] https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web [2] https://flutter.github.io/s…

Wow that's pretty insane. I can't select any text on any of those examples, I can't open anything in a new tab, and I can't save any images.

For some web app, that's a feature

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#246

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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.

Why does it have to be sad? When software becomes easier to develop, it enables everyone to benefit. More developers, more applications of software. At the same time, performance has a tangential relationship with computer code being interpreted or compiled to native. After all, Java is compiled to byte code and powers plenty of high traffic servers efficiently. Many AAA games use ActionScript, Python, Lua, etc for t…

After all, Java is compiled to byte code and powers plenty of high traffic servers efficiently.

How well has Java done on the client in the last two decades?

Many AAA games use ActionScript, Python, Lua, etc for their UIs and scripting for mods.

What's the actual performance sensitive parts written in?

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#247
post #237

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Microsoft and Adobe update their apps quite frequently -- for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. I gladly pay $100 a year for O365. What are some well done cross platform apps that don't unnecessarily drain battery life? I can think of one - VSCode.

Huge companies, yes. They'd still prefer to spend less money/resource/time if they have the option to though, hence why some large companies actively explore cross platform technology. Adobe did that with phonegap a long time ago. You're talking about Electron there, which like phonegap is a browser wrapper and a different thing to RN. I don't believe RN is known to be a battery drain in general.

How well did PhoneGap work out?

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#248

I tried using this a few months ago, as well as React Native for mobile and React Native Web for web, and I felt like they were all just hacks glued together to get cross-platform support, and RN isn't even native, it still includes a Javascript bridge. Build dependencies and packages were a nightmare, things continuously broke. I tried Flutter afterwards and it just felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything "just…

I've done a few client projects in the past using React Native. I get the appeal of having a "single" codebase for iOS and Android, but I absolutely detested using it. I'm quite sure and aware of people that love it, but just from my personal development background, it just never really seemed appealing to me. Definitely not a fan of how state is handled. I've rolled my own system, Redux, and a host of other solution…

can you go into more detail about "how state is handled"? I wouldn't have considered that to be one of the offerings of React Native (or Flutter).

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#249
post #5

Flutter seems to be gaining ground on React Native. And they also have web and desktop ports. Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends.

Flutter on desktop has been "right around the corner" for about 5 years now.

I've been building in Flutter for desktop (macOS) for a year and a half. It's _still_ feeling early, but if you're comfortable writing a bit of native code, it pretty much just works (for single window applications — hopefully that changes soon).

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#250
post #5

Flutter seems to be gaining ground on React Native. And they also have web and desktop ports. Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends.

The community is finally at its first apex. I tried it this past weekend, and the VSCode setup was so sexy and easy to get started. I dropped React-Native in a heart beat, even losing a few weeks of work. The biggest gripe I have with React-Native is the many JS packages on npm that we can't use due to how the code is exported. It's a huge hack job, which Flutter absolutely destroyed by having everything I needed as…

A three year old package would be an issue with Flutter. The move to Dart 2 was not backwards compatible.

That said, there's an effort in the community to find maintainers for older packages that people find useful. If you come across something that you need, post back, or shoot me an email.

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