React Native made me give up a project today • Hacker News Board

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#71

Post by amateurInAll » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #38

You quit after a single day? those are rookie tenacity numbers bud, gotta pump those up. give yourself at least a week, all new things are tough. I have been programming professionally for 15 years and I still encounter these uphill battles that feel terrible - but once you are over the hump it is often smooth sailing.

I agree with you! But in this case it's for a hobby project and I don't have much personal time for it. The feature I wanted to add wouldn't work with the old codebase, and I was curious to try the current libraries/tooling. But the fun factor is zero if the whole time budget goes into just setup problems.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#72

Post by amateurInAll » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

cyberprunes wrote: post #65

api wrote: post #9

React Native is one of those things I instinctively avoided, not because it's bad but because it's a big ball of crap. Anything with that many dependencies and long install processes and such is going to be extremely brittle and hard to maintain.

I would say that a big ball of crap qualifies as bad.

:D

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#73

Post by woojoo666 » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #39

taeric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorta? You can claim it is the fault of Apple, but as it is literally the problem that RN is trying to solve, it is very much their problem.

Who solves this problem any better in the cross-platform GUI space? Well, maybe Qt, but even if it does, C++ is much less forgiving than TS.

Electron. Everybody knows about the performance issues, but there's a reason why people still use it

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#74

Post by WirelessGigabit » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

woojoo666 wrote: post #73

nine_k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who solves this problem any better in the cross-platform GUI space? Well, maybe Qt, but even if it does, C++ is much less forgiving than TS.

Electron. Everybody knows about the performance issues, but there's a reason why people still use it

Stop shipping a browser with your website.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#75

Post by WirelessGigabit » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 2:41 AM UTC

rgoulter wrote: post #30

qazxcvbnm wrote: post #17

That's one of the big reasons why I've been Nixifying my React Native projects, and gradually it seems to be working out. A number of projects seem to be starting to do something like that as well, like status-im, and occasionally I find their configs helpful. By itself, Nix doesn't help with the M1 React Native problems, but with fastlane, Ruby, cocoapods, things really nicely just worked, and once I've figured ever…

Yes and no. I mean, I think this is absolutely the killer feature of Nix (even above the more accessible asdf, since Nix will also provide native libraries); it's really nice to get a development environment which will Just Work. (OP's frustration isn't unusual). On the other hand, Nix doesn't make problems disappear; and can require having a deep understanding of what the problem encountered is. OP ran into problems…

I don't understand the love for asdf. It doesn't support node versions like let's/gallium. It doesn't support Python venvs. Back to nvm and pyenv-virtualenv for me.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#76

Post by nine_k » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 3:00 AM UTC

woojoo666 wrote: post #73

nine_k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who solves this problem any better in the cross-platform GUI space? Well, maybe Qt, but even if it does, C++ is much less forgiving than TS.

Electron. Everybody knows about the performance issues, but there's a reason why people still use it

I'm not sure Electron proper is a viable path for mobile development.

Offline-capable web apps are, or course, a viable alternative, as long as you can afford ignoring iOS.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#77

Post by joshxyz » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 11:13 AM UTC

otikik wrote: post #20

> React Native is great; React Native firebase is great; Firebase is great; Apple is great. Forgive me for saying this, but the fact that you started with that line makes it sound like you might have some Stockholm Syndrome (or perhaps Sunk Cost Fallacy is more appropriate here). Because what you wrote afterwards makes it clear that at least some of the parts that you mentioned afterwards are in fact not great.

OP forgot to add Windows is great.

jesus christ so hard to code there.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#78

Post by jamil7 » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 11:57 AM UTC

marstall wrote: post #67

rn setup can be hard - but consider the problem space - two different operating systems, two different build systems. if 1 day is the max you're willing to put in to investigate build/config errors, there are very few dev environments you're going to succeed in. Take, for example, native iOS development. For any dev, that involves regular bouts of multi-day configuration hell. Xcode is a huge beast and cryptic for be…

> Take, for example, native iOS development. For any dev, that involves regular bouts of multi-day configuration hell. Xcode is a huge beast and cryptic for beginners. Add in multiple third party libraries like firebase and it's a tossup which is harder, native or RN.

Hard disagree here, to me this is one of the parts of native iOS development that is far, far better than web development. The web makes up for this with other strengths, but there is no way they're even comparable setup wise.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#79

Post by api » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

cyberprunes wrote: post #65

api wrote: post #9

React Native is one of those things I instinctively avoided, not because it's bad but because it's a big ball of crap. Anything with that many dependencies and long install processes and such is going to be extremely brittle and hard to maintain.

I would say that a big ball of crap qualifies as bad.

That was poorly worded. What I meant was that React Native results seem good but the system itself looks fragile and messy and rickety. It seems to inherit a lot of the complexity and irregularity diseases that plague the entire JavaScript and web ecosystem.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#80

Post by marstall » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 2:17 PM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #78

marstall wrote: post #67

rn setup can be hard - but consider the problem space - two different operating systems, two different build systems. if 1 day is the max you're willing to put in to investigate build/config errors, there are very few dev environments you're going to succeed in. Take, for example, native iOS development. For any dev, that involves regular bouts of multi-day configuration hell. Xcode is a huge beast and cryptic for be…

> Take, for example, native iOS development. For any dev, that involves regular bouts of multi-day configuration hell. Xcode is a huge beast and cryptic for beginners. Add in multiple third party libraries like firebase and it's a tossup which is harder, native or RN. Hard disagree here, to me this is one of the parts of native iOS development that is far, far better than web development. The web makes up for this wi…

I guess we had a different experience - perhaps it is better now. my experience with native development was around 2014 with the objectiveC to Swift transition and that was its own hell - but I remember spending a lot of time, maybe 20-30% of my time I would guess, staring down weird build errors.