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React Native at Airbnb

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Re: React Native at Airbnb

#31

Post by htormey »

akmarinov wrote: post #30

Reading a bit between the lines and keeping in mind that rumour that Facebook was removing RN from some of their projects… Could it be true? Does AirBNB see the writing on the wall somehow? I know that RN is open source and people will continue to support it and everything will be great, but without Facebook behind it, I wonder how much traction it’ll have.

"keeping in mind that rumour that Facebook was removing RN from some of their projects"

Where are you getting that from? The React Native team at Facebook just put out a roadmap that seemed to indicate they were still very committed to the project and investing in it:

http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state...

"At Facebook, we're using React Native more than ever and for many important projects. One of our most popular products is Marketplace, one of the top-level tabs in our app which is used by 800 million people each month. Since its creation in 2015, all of Marketplace has been built with React Native, including over a hundred full-screen views throughout different parts of the app."

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#32

Post by shafte »

akmarinov wrote: post #30

Reading a bit between the lines and keeping in mind that rumour that Facebook was removing RN from some of their projects… Could it be true? Does AirBNB see the writing on the wall somehow? I know that RN is open source and people will continue to support it and everything will be great, but without Facebook behind it, I wonder how much traction it’ll have.

That rumor was thoroughly debunked (see the discussion in the original HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216628).

Please don't repeat and spread false rumors. It cheapens discussion about legitimate technical choices that organizations make.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#33

Post by danabramov »

eysquared wrote: post #22
onedev wrote: post #3

Others have been coming out and talking about similar experiences with React Native. This thread made the rounds on Twitter and Medium fairly recently: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1002634185566236679 https://twitter.com/VivekxK/status/1002694526467653632

The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. Doing so while working across organizations that may or may not use react-native is doubly so. Sometimes this boils down to the technology, knowledge, and the engineering systems needed to support both but I've also found native developers tend to strongly dislike react-native and lobby against whenever they can. For me, I'm using it to successfu…

>The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard.

We've experienced some of the difficulties in this area at Facebook as well. If you're curious, making native JS integration more seamless is a big motivation for the ongoing architectural revamp that we've recently posted about: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state...

It's a shame we weren't fast enough to help Airbnb in these areas, but the native interop will get better when the revamp is finished.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#34

Post by efrafa »

MBCook wrote: post #24
kbyatnal wrote: post #16

"While debugging, React Native attaches to a Chrome Developer Tools instance. This is great because it is a powerful debugger. However, once the debugger is attached, all JavaScript runs within Chrome’s V8 engine. This is fine 99.9% of the time. However, in one instance, we got bit when toLocaleString worked on iOS and but only worked on Android while debugging. It turns out that the Android JSC doesn’t include it an…

I had something like that once in native web dev. It turned out that by default when using the debugging pane the browser would disable cache so the issue (whatever it was) disappeared. Close debugging? It broke again. Maddening.

You can disable cache while dev tools are open in chrome but its not the default.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#35

Post by eysquared »

danabramov wrote: post #33
eysquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. Doing so while working across organizations that may or may not use react-native is doubly so. Sometimes this boils down to the technology, knowledge, and the engineering systems needed to support both but I've also found native developers tend to strongly dislike react-native and lobby against whenever they can. For me, I'm using it to successfu…

>The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. We've experienced some of the difficulties in this area at Facebook as well. If you're curious, making native JS integration more seamless is a big motivation for the ongoing architectural revamp that we've recently posted about: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state... It's a shame we weren't fast enough to help Airbnb in…

I'm excited about the proposed changes and think they are a step in the right direction, but I also worry that they will add more fuel to the fire that react-native as a platform is a constant moving target.

You obviously have much more insight into what the re-architecture will entail than I do but I've heard a lot of worry around that post with regards to backwards compatibility of third party libraries and in-house native components.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#36

Post by woolvalley »

onedev wrote: post #3

Others have been coming out and talking about similar experiences with React Native. This thread made the rounds on Twitter and Medium fairly recently: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1002634185566236679 https://twitter.com/VivekxK/status/1002694526467653632

Yup it's the classic double layer issue. I think the only way to do it right is to go full 'game engine' style, like flutter or unity. With these you have a very small GL library surface area and one platform stack to actually understand for most of your engineers. Maybe something like WebAssembly will be similar.

You often don't hear about these kinds of issues out of game engine makers. I could be totally wrong although since I haven't worked on games.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#37

Post by woolvalley »

SneakerXZ wrote: post #23
smt88 wrote: post #5

None of the recent articles or HN comment threads about React Native spend much time evaluating Haxe. I guess it's not that widely used for CRUD apps and is more popular for games? Anyway, I'd love to know how it would work for an Airbnb-like org.

It is same with Xamarin. They don't have people that would know these languages, and they would be passionate about them.

Xamarin and co suffer from the same dual layer issues that react native has when I last looked into it.

C# isn't that popular from a silicon valley engineering perspective, since the first class C# implementation wasn't open source until very recently. Yes mono has always be OSS, but it has also been a second class citizen too.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#38

Post by kgin »

eysquared wrote: post #22
onedev wrote: post #3

Others have been coming out and talking about similar experiences with React Native. This thread made the rounds on Twitter and Medium fairly recently: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1002634185566236679 https://twitter.com/VivekxK/status/1002694526467653632

The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. Doing so while working across organizations that may or may not use react-native is doubly so. Sometimes this boils down to the technology, knowledge, and the engineering systems needed to support both but I've also found native developers tend to strongly dislike react-native and lobby against whenever they can. For me, I'm using it to successfu…

That was my take away as well, which makes sense. I think trying to seamlessly merge functionality across any two paradigms is going to be tougher than sticking with just one or the other. But for any company with an existing app, mixing in is the most likely first baby step into react native.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#40

Post by SneakerXZ »

woolvalley wrote: post #37
SneakerXZ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is same with Xamarin. They don't have people that would know these languages, and they would be passionate about them.

Xamarin and co suffer from the same dual layer issues that react native has when I last looked into it. C# isn't that popular from a silicon valley engineering perspective, since the first class C# implementation wasn't open source until very recently. Yes mono has always be OSS, but it has also been a second class citizen too.

Only Xamarin.Forms introduces another layer for you (it is the same concept as React Native). If you use Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android you call underlying APIs directly. Although there can be issues with bindings, nothing like you will face with React Native.

I am aware of why C# isn't popular among startups. It is sad because C# is a great language that has amazing tooling support. It runs everywhere - Xamarin for apps, ASP.NET for servers, Blazor for browsers, and it is getting only better, and I cannot imagine how awesome it would be if other companies helped Microsoft. But I can only dream.

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