I'm not familiar with UI development at all, but I'm kind of amazed that the old solution of a giant async bridge where the renderer enqueued native function calls worked at all. What was the initial reasoning behind this architecture? (that is to say, why did it seem like a good idea at the time?)
New Architecture is here
61–70 of 127 posts
Re: New Architecture is here
#62Love react native, I'll be updating to this version soon. Really hoping it makes suspense work correctly with libs like Relay. Well done and thank you RN team.
Re: New Architecture is here
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit does a lot better of job bringing good relevant comments to the top.
Reddit has a lower barrier to entry, which will invite lower quality comments. Sadly product officers are starting to flow into HN and other people with no programming experience, so the quality of comments are as such. If there was a fizzbuzz challenge to sign up, i'd bet the comments would not consist of such nonsense.
This is extremely elitist and reductionist. Plenty of the best comments/discussions on HN come from non-programmers. Personally, I like that people from various backgrounds come together like this as it tends to provoke more interesting discussion and makes HN less of an echo chamber than Reddit.
Re: New Architecture is here
#64I'm a Flutter dev since 2018 and I am honestly not sure if Flutter or React Native still make sense in 2024 and onwards. When they emerged, the mobile development scene was completely different than today. Today, we have Swift UI and Compose, both are pretty solid. I'm not sure if it's the consensus amongst mobile developers, but I believe that on the mid/long run you will be better off - even if you write things twi…
> I believe that on the mid/long run you will be better off - even if you write things twice.
People have believed this the whole time and also a ton of people didn't then and don't now. What has actually changed?
Re: New Architecture is here
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love that you asked this question. As someone who has created a few react native applications in the past, non expo environments has felt as an afterthought. I hope the react native team will improve the documentation and encourage the native platform as well as the expo platform. Some of us don't want to be locked into yet another SaaS with questionable payment tiers - when building your own modules and publishing…
> - You're able to ship a far more featureful application if you deal with media and/or VoIP Can you expand on this? How does Expo prevent or make it harder for you to ship media- and VOIP-related features?
When you're using expo you cannot bundle your own native extensions. At my previous job we used pjsip. This extension uses JNI and native calls in iOS via objective-c. You can't bundle native extensions when using expo. You're locked to their prebuilt ones.
To use your own extensions you have to eject/or start a new application with their own native libraries. For most of what expo does you can use the unimodules libraries, they're quite good in my experience.
Re: New Architecture is here
#66I will now inform everyone here that the Windows 11 Start Menu uses React Native. You're welcome :)
Re: New Architecture is here
#67React native is finally pretty good this year. It still has problems but I feel like it's really starting to pick up momentum. When react-strict-dom is totally ready for prime time it's going to be a game changer and react native will become an absolute juggernaut.
How so? What makes this a game changer for the average dev?
Re: New Architecture is here
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's a pain in the ass to distribute. And there's not much for support integrated into mobile operating systems for seamless browser windows. MacOS is getting there kind of lately with safari being able to turn web pages into apps. But there isn't really built in mechanisms for that: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/14/how-web-apps-work-macos...
Web apps will always on paper be slower (not including badly made applications on both) than native apps, and also bring in additional security issues (since code is loaded remotely) than native applications.
apps built using the webview don't necessarily have to be loaded remotely. If you're building with capacitor, then nothing happens remotely until you choose.
The part about being slower is still true though.
Re: New Architecture is here
#69I'm a Flutter dev since 2018 and I am honestly not sure if Flutter or React Native still make sense in 2024 and onwards. When they emerged, the mobile development scene was completely different than today. Today, we have Swift UI and Compose, both are pretty solid. I'm not sure if it's the consensus amongst mobile developers, but I believe that on the mid/long run you will be better off - even if you write things twi…
Hmm, what about desktop and/or web?
Re: New Architecture is here
#70Is there any sane way of using RN without locking into the Expo ecosystem? Last I checked it was a nightmare dealing with native dependencies otherwise.
React Native added auto-linking years ago, which solved the native dependency problems. Just `yarn add` whatever you need, and if it has native code, the the Android side will incorporate it on the next build. On the iOS side, you do have to run `pod install` to lock in the changes, but everything after that is automatic.
Use Expo because you like the extra features it ships with, but not because you have problems with native dependencies. The React Native built-in experience is pretty much perfect to start with.