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React Native at Instagram

engineering.instagram.com

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Re: React Native at Instagram

#12
post #7
post #6

I didn't know what single/multi-dex means so i looked it up. Android application (APK) files contain executable bytecode files in the form of Dalvik Executable (DEX) files, which contain the compiled code used to run your app. The Dalvik Executable specification limits the total number of methods that can be referenced within a single DEX file to 65,536, including Android framework methods, library methods, and metho…

Iirc, the reason you end up hitting the limit for 65k methods is that each library tends to keep independent copies of its dependencies. This simplifies dependency control, but ends up mushrooming quickly.

That is actually not true. Afaik multiversioning of dependencies is not actually supported by build systems without manual effort (not counting major versions in non-conflicting namespaces). Problem is really more in fat libraries and "unnecessary" (getters, setters) and synthetic (e.g. access to private methods from inner classes) methods that are usually not optimized away, especially in debug builds.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#13
The careers link posted in the footnote errors when loading: https://our.intern.facebook.com/l.php?d=AQHtPpH_2FKp-3oVD3c5...

"Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Based on the URL, is this actually some internal FB link tracking redirect? You probably simply want direct URL: https://www.instagram.com/about/jobs

Re: React Native at Instagram

#14

@martinbigio here in case anyone has questions

Are you considering to build the camera part with react or keep it native cause react wont add the needed functionality?

No plans for powering camera using React Native for now. We already have great native infra for that and regardless, IMHO RN might not be the best technology to implement those kind of immersive ultra-performant flows.

We see space for React Native to grow inside of Instagram on flows similar to the ones mentioned on the blog post.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#15

@martinbigio here in case anyone has questions

Did you guys use any other libraries from the React ecosystem to implement these features? (redux, normalizr, redux-saga, etc.)

Also, what approach did you use for testing the RN flows? (unit testing, e2e testing, etc).

BTW, thanks for sharing your experiences!

Re: React Native at Instagram

#16
This is huge. 87-99% shared code between iOS and Android. Someday companies as big as Instagram won't need to have entire separate product teams for separate platforms.

> React Native allowed product teams to ship features faster to both our iOS and Android apps. The list below shows the percentage of code shared between the apps for some of the products, which could be used as a proxy to measure how we managed to improve developer velocity:

Post Promote: 99%

SMS Captcha Checkpoint: 97%

Comment Moderation: 85%

Lead Gen Ads: 87%

Push Notification Settings: 92%

Re: React Native at Instagram

#18

The careers link posted in the footnote errors when loading: https://our.intern.facebook.com/l.php?d=AQHtPpH_2FKp-3oVD3c5... "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can." Based on the URL, is this actually some internal FB link tracking redirect? You probably simply want direct URL: https://www.instagram.com/about/jobs

Oops, that was an internal link - fixing now.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#19
post #3

I'm getting tired of having to allow scripts to even get to see the images. Why dont they use tags?

In addition, if you happen to have a slow connection, all you see is blurred blobs instead of pictures. I never experience that with proper img tags because, you know, most major browsers have been doing progressive loading (which works with basic img tags) since several years ago and it works very well in most cases. I don't see why the guys at Medium felt they needed to reinvent the wheel. I hate Medium's layout and since they allow custom domains it's becoming very hard to avoid Medium links at all.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#20

@martinbigio here in case anyone has questions

What would be the biggest hurdling block to rewrite the main feed into React Native? As a follow-up, do you think there's a performant enough ListView implementation in RN to build the feed with?
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