> It doesn't expect the first output to be correct, and builds a loop where an imperfect attempt simply cannot move forward until it becomes a good result.
So... local maxima?
Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
101–110 of 962 posts
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#102They don't say anything in the post. But hotwire native supports pushing ui elements to ios and android. I imagine that might be part of the reason. I haven't built anything substantial with hotwire native though so I am not sure on all of the edge cases.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#103We made the same change for our patient app last month, took 2 months to rewrite from react-native to two mobile apps, but we had the PoC in under a week.
Interestingly Apple approved it very quickly, which I was afraid of given such a huge rewrite.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#104If you put every company that needs/has an app on a spectrum, there is a line somewhere that roughly divides them into two groups: where Electron/React Native/etc. makes sense or not. It's just a normal engineering decision: solving problems given limited resources. Companies have different problems and different resources. I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to ha…
> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. I don't think that's necessarily true. Nuance is a thing. These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are). But that doesn't mean I can't understand or even agr…
I think you contradicted yourself. If a tool provides better value for the time spent for a company, I don’t understand how you can call it objectively bad.
You can say it’s objectively bad from a technical perspective, but clearly that’s only one part of the equation.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#105“We debated between gradually migrating to native (brownfield) versus rebuilding them from scratch (greenfield)… However, this time greenfield emerged as a clear winner for the following reasons” “To solve this problem, we built a system called Helix that takes a more gradual approach. It doesn't expect the first output to be correct, and builds a loop where an imperfect attempt simply cannot move forward until it be…
There's also "Helix rebuilding a screen in the Shopify mobile app using Swift and Kotlin" which sounds like a caption but there is no video or image.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
And people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...
This is a type of project that likely wouldn't have been done before AI
Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#107We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…
React native is an obstacle compared to what clear Swift/Kotlin code may produce. Swift is very powerful and Kotlin, in all honesty, is the first reasonable and very useful thing to come to the JRE ecosystem (save for Scala, which is, well, quite complex still).
Myself turned some python code to Swift, and keep doing so, without trouble or pressure. Of course, I've been doing fair amount of systems programming for 20 years now, so not sure what to advice newcomers. But this approach to dev DOES work for me very well.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#108We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens. I started at about 12:30am by giving codex a goal and it inventoried every screen based on the react native code, then created android and iOS directories, used maestro (I had already set up this tooling for a previous personal app build a few weeks prior), and…
Next up, designing an even higher level language which will be used by LLMs to compile to high level languages like kotlin or swift. Just store instructions for LLMs in repos.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#109If you put every company that needs/has an app on a spectrum, there is a line somewhere that roughly divides them into two groups: where Electron/React Native/etc. makes sense or not. It's just a normal engineering decision: solving problems given limited resources. Companies have different problems and different resources. I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to ha…
> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. I don't think that's necessarily true. Nuance is a thing. These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are). But that doesn't mean I can't understand or even agr…
None of this matters anymore.
We have LLMs.
It's easy to build native everything now without much resource expenditure.
Android will be Kotlin. iOS will be Swift. Desktop and server will be Rust. Web will be TypeScript / React for now, but maybe one day WASM.
LLMs are the target now.
Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
#110We don’t hold on to a decision just because it was successful at the time. When a core assumption changes, we’re willing to go back and ask whether it’s still the right call. LLMs changed one of the core assumptions behind our 2020 decision, so we reevaluated our mobile stack from first principles. What we found led us back to native.
Did you switch to SwiftUI or UIKit?