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Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

shopify.engineering

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Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#431

Post by ivm »

azkalam wrote: post #361
pkaler wrote: post #43

I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now. Teams jump on the latest cross-platform framework assuming that it will reduce headcount cost at the expense of having a lowest-common denominator app on each platform. The latter is true but the former is false. What ends up happening is that teams start as 20 iOS e…

I can see the case for shared core libraries and then platform native views. This is best done in one programming language. Can Swift, Rust or .NET work here?

Yes, native .NET without MAUI is great for that. I have my app running with MvvmCross and two native UIs on iOS and Android since 2018, with hundreds of thousands of installs.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#433

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

xp84 wrote: post #377
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really grinds my gears is Microsoft replacing native apps with Electron. Trillion dollar company who is so cash strapped they have no choice but to punt to the easy development path.

Yikes. What apps have they been doing this with?

Turns out I was mistaken. Outlook was rewritten for Webview, not Electron. So still took a native application and turned it into web nonsense, but I got the specifics wrong.

Regardless, there are a bunch of new visual glitches in the release, with regressed performance all over the place.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#434

Post by echelon »

raincole wrote: post #429
echelon wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These apps predated LLMs "getting good". Both have an enormous number of paying customers and you don't just disrupt that for a language change.

Anthropic literally rewrote the whole runtime CC is based on in another language. And even then they still not dared to migrate it away from React.

Zig -> Rust is straightforward and is a good advertisement for their model.

React -> Rust is ambitious and the models aren't there yet.

Soon.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#435

Post by drdexebtjl »

greenowl wrote: post #414
kccqzy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistakes you describe are only possible if the company doesn’t really think there’s proprietary IP in the codebase. If a company really believed there’s valuable IP in code, there would at a minimum, ban laptops or ban code on laptops[0], provide and maintain a centrally managed LLM gateway[1] that handles authentication, billing and model choice, have MDM to prevent you from using your own Claude login, etc. [0]…

I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that. Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch…

How's that any different from, say, Windows updating and backing up the company's code to OneDrive?

Actions speak louder than words. If the company doesn't even supply and require work devices, they don't effectively consider their code to be valuable IP.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#437

Post by mike_ivanov »

synergy20 wrote: post #392
mike_ivanov wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wxWidgets carries too much legacy. A GTK3 fork maybe? Or a functional clone of QML with some improvements.

maybe gtk4 gui first then ask llm to recreate them natively on windows and macos

no, not gtk4 - they lost their way after v3

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#438

Post by greenowl »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #435
greenowl wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that. Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch…

How's that any different from, say, Windows updating and backing up the company's code to OneDrive? Actions speak louder than words. If the company doesn't even supply and require work devices, they don't effectively consider their code to be valuable IP.

Is Microsoft mining their customers' backup files looking for source code to ingest into their model training pipeline?

Of course the company can still consider their code to be valuable IP.

Re: Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

#439

Post by jrochkind1 »

raspo wrote: post #320
jrochkind1 wrote: post #268

I'm not totally following the part about the simulator(s), probably because I haven't actually done mobile development before. > When simulator interaction is needed, the CLI can connect to them via a remote mode and drive the UI via commands without having to inspect the layout or the accessibility tree. This enables blazing-fast performance and E2E tests. I think I'm not following. Don't you still need to test the…

I have done some iOS development and still couldn't follow what the article was saying about the simulator. I'm actually quite interested in it, because (in my experience at least) verifying that the UI works as expected is quite painful with current LLMs and the developer tools available. They talk about building a CLI and keeping business logic isolated, ok fine, but do they still run the simulator and take screens…

indeed it's not totally clear to me if they do or not, my question too! OK, good to know it's not just something I was confused about because of lack of context!
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