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React Native for Windows and Mac

microsoft.github.io

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Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#421

Post by andreareina »

krzat wrote: post #333
scarface74 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad for who? Yes and a long time ago Sun came out with Swing. How did that work out? Even before that MS came out with P-Code and the abomination that was Word 6 for the Mac.

Sad for developers. What I had in mind regarding desktop were big tools like Blender, Photoshop, Blender, IntelliJ IDEs, which existed long before Electron. I think it clearly shows that complex UI apps require cross platform UI, or will remain single platform (Xcode, Visual Studio).

I'm pretty confident that the reason for Xcode being single-platform is that Apple doesn't care about anybody not using {mac,i}OS.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#422

Post by jmull »

hyperbovine wrote: post #412
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…

A lot of these "packages" are just silly though. Among the horde of dependencies in that web is `number-is-nan`. Behold its awesome functionality: https://www.npmjs.com/package/number-is-nan Want Array#filter/map/reduce? Why that'll be three separate packages: https://www.npmjs.com/package/array-filter https://www.npmjs.com/package/array-map https://www.npmjs.com/package/array-reduce It just seems to be the culture o…

The purpose of that kind of package is to provide a standalone implementation of a function.

To criticize this organization, you would need to understand why people find that to be valuable and show a better approach.

You’re attributing it to “culture” but there may be deeper, less arbitrary reasons. Look up “ponyfill” if you are interested in learning about it.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#423

Post by jbverschoor »

hyperbovine wrote: post #412
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…

A lot of these "packages" are just silly though. Among the horde of dependencies in that web is `number-is-nan`. Behold its awesome functionality: https://www.npmjs.com/package/number-is-nan Want Array#filter/map/reduce? Why that'll be three separate packages: https://www.npmjs.com/package/array-filter https://www.npmjs.com/package/array-map https://www.npmjs.com/package/array-reduce It just seems to be the culture o…

It's a result of hiring policy which looks at the number of git repo's, open source projects etc you have.

KPIs are always the driver. Also for programmers.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#424

Post by akie »

gitgud wrote: post #206
exacube wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I got a big grey screen on the first three I clicked. Not sure if this is ready for prime time...

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#425

Post by 0-O-0 »

jiofih wrote: post #197
throwaway6734 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone just getting into mobile development, I've enjoyed using it significantly more than native iOS/Android. It's so much faster and more straightforward to spin up designs,

Until your first update. I assume you didn’t work on anything that has been released?

Update as in you application update or dependency update?

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#426

Post by satvikpendem »

SZJX wrote: post #387
satvikpendem wrote: post #69

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'm kinda surprised that everything "just works" for Flutter, even on Windows and Linux, which the official documentation seems to say are still in alpha stages and might be subject to breaking changes in the future. I also couldn't find ways to easily implement things I want, e.g. native Mac MenuBar bindings/Mac App Store payment library etc. Eventually I ended up using Quasar https://quasar.dev/ , which allows you…

Yes, Flutter is useful for when you have GUI heavy apps, not necessarily ones with platform integration like menu bars and cameras, although that is progressing pretty well I'd say, people are writing plugins for platform capabilities.

Regarding Windows and Linux, I too was surprised at how well everything worked. You can't build to production yet for these two platforms (officially at least, see flutter-rs for unofficial implementations), but the debug builds still work as well as the Android and iOS emulators. I used them on a lower powered machine to run my Flutter apps and it was great that they worked well.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#427

Post by zubnix »

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

Not sure what browser you're using. But here it's actually using webcomponents and CSS houdini to render all demos I tried. Nowhere did I see any canvas usage.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#428

Post by satvikpendem »

tiborsaas wrote: post #354
distantaidenn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for a toy app, it's pretty simple, but once you begin to build real-world apps, with 30 or 40+ components, and their children, I just found passing state and props around a bit messy and hacky. Of course, then you introduce Redux, and all is well. But now you have to deal with transducers and actions, and so on. I just didn't find the tradeoff worth it, and prefer native development. I'm sure every React develo…

Check out React context to avoid this property passing, which is annoying, I agree. Did you know that Redux is now basically built into React? https://medium.com/simply/state-management-with-react-hooks-... https://blog.logrocket.com/use-hooks-and-context-not-react-a...

In contrast,

https://www.simplethread.com/cant-replace-redux-with-hooks/ https://daveceddia.com/context-api-vs-redux/ https://medium.com/javascript-scene/do-react-hooks-replace-r...

TL;DR Context can replace some but not all of Redux. Redux can figure out which components to rerender based on what's being computed. Context doesn't, so it's basically the same as refreshing your entire component tree every time something changes. You could build it yourself, but at that point, you're just reinventing Redux.

I also like the Redux Toolkit (https://redux-toolkit.js.org/) which is an opinionated way to write Redux that cuts down the boilerplate a lot. createSlice is easily one of the best features, you can encapsulate Redux logic for each different type of content, like authentication, users, posts, etc.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#429

Post by andreareina »

jamil7 wrote: post #362
scarface74 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me tell you a story... I was at a crossroads in 2008. I had been developing mostly in C for a decade and decided to pivot to being your standard “Enterprise Dev”. I had a choice between moving my career to C# or Java. I chose C# partly because of the bad stench of the cross platform Java IDEs at the time. Give me VS or Xcode any day over a Java based IDE. Photoshop definitely isn’t using a non native runtime. I d…

Can't speak for VS but XCode is a pig.

For those that don't know, the latest version is an 8GB download.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#430

Post by satvikpendem »

distantaidenn wrote: post #261
ledauphin wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Well, for a toy app, it's pretty simple, but once you begin to build real-world apps, with 30 or 40+ components, and their children, I just found passing state and props around a bit messy and hacky. Of course, then you introduce Redux, and all is well. But now you have to deal with transducers and actions, and so on. I just didn't find the tradeoff worth it, and prefer native development. I'm sure every React develo…

Flutter has a few different state management techniques, and even a Redux implementation. Provider is the most commonly used one.

For Redux with React, you could check out Redux Toolkit (https://redux-toolkit.js.org/). It solves a lot of the boilerplate issues with Redux. createSlice is especially valuable.

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