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React Native for Windows and Mac

microsoft.github.io

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Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#161

Post by contextfree »

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

Isn't this consistent with Flutter's approach in general, though? On iOS, Android, etc., it uses its own widget toolkit and does its own rendering, it's not a wrapper over the native toolkits and renderers.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#162

Post by AgentME »

fermienrico wrote: post #140
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…

The web has become truly awful and it’s invading desktop apps. We need to refactor our technology stack.

Most native apps I've downloaded are well into tens or hundreds megabytes. I just tried a few big popular sites with caching off and none of them downloaded more than a couple megabytes of javascript. I'm really skeptical of the popular wisdom around here that web dev is doing something especially egregious when it comes to build sizes or dependencies.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#163

Post by yesimahuman »

crazypython wrote: post #148
yesimahuman wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Ionic which now fully supports React and will give you a similar benefit but without the need to use RNW or have different code for each platform. Also Ionic’s components are much more robust and widely used than RNW.

I agree that Ionic's components are easier to work with and less of a hassle. However, React Native components let you talk directly to native, even using native components from the native platform's ecosystem in your code. It's a tradeoff developers have to make. https://github.com/wix/react-native-navigation is beautiful, it uses iOS' own navigation APIs, but it's a pain.

That’s fair! One other option is to do both: use Capacitor and embed it inside native navigation controls (i.e. a native shell), then use Ionic React for screens, etc.

One other aspect is that Ionic React uses react-dom so it will be a pretty normal react dev experience compared to RN which isn’t 1-1 (CSS being an example).

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#164

Post by macinjosh »

scarface74 wrote: post #142
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…

For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. This says so much about the sad state of modern software development... When native development is a last resort.

Why does it have to be sad? To me it is good news! Especially if it is open source. The more software we can write that isn’t specific to a platform the more free and useful software can become. It wrestles back control from google, apple, microsoft et. al and makes their closed platforms less relevant.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#166

Post by yodon »

preommr wrote: post #150
yodon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can't figure out what will be relevant in six months" might have been a legitimate complaint a decade ago, but those days are long gone. React has been a core part of the front end ecosystem for almost 10 years. Angular is more than 10 years old. Vue is the "new kid" on the block at about six years old. React is roughly 10x more popular than Vue or Angular according to npm usage, has been far more popular in usage…

Oh, c'mon, that's a bit of a stretch. I was around in 2014, when angular 1 was starting to be a big thing. If you look at reactjs on google trends, react gets its first bump in 2014-15, and then another one around 2017. VueJs gets a huge jump in 2016-2017. --- Java has been around for decades, has had much fewer changes, and is entrenched in a lot of code. In comparison, react has gone through some big changes in a v…

Everyone can set their threshold for when they noticed React at whatever point they choose. Regardless of when any particular individual noticed React, it has undeniably been a big deal for years and can be reasonably expected to remain relevant for years to come. The assertion that "omg front end changes so much how can I know if React will matter in six months" is simply nonsense.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#168

Post by dragonshed »

int_19h wrote: post #45
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Forms was released on 2002 and is still supported by Microsoft. How long do you think Flutter will be supported by Google? For dev technology, Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for supporting products for a long time.

It... depends. Remember Silverlight?

Ahh, the good ol days. I lost count of how many Xaml-based UI Frameworks got released. In 2011 I started learning web development for UI, almost immediately after Microsoft announced Windows 8 and WinRT at build. This graphic [0] was the writing on the wall.

[0] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1555...

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#169

Post by contextfree »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #90
filoleg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React Native was a thing for native mobile app development. The post is talking about React Native becoming available for native desktop app development.

You mean when this came out 4 years ago? I'm not sure why this is being posted as "News"... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11386595 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11490190

While it's not that new (has been public for over a year), this is a different, newer implementation of RNW (written in C++ instead of C#)

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#170

Post by satvikpendem »

_bxg1 wrote: post #92
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…

> RN isn't even native, it still includes a Javascript bridge "Native" doesn't describe the programming language, but the GUI layer. Native == non-web-browser.

I've seen both uses of the term "native"; it's an overloaded term. Some use it to mean "native UI", and others use it to mean "natively compiled". I meant it in the latter case. I actually prefer wholly custom UI, as most apps do these days that are cross-platform, because it allows for very interesting user experiences. Of course, some people disagree, wanting everything to be native-looking and feeling to their platform, such as Linux apps all using GTK or macOS all using Cocoa.
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