7 ms·

React Native 0.59.0-rc.0 released

64 points by saranshk 8y ago

blkhp19 8y ago
I feel like the React Native fad has come and gone. Even FB is using their own server-driven UI solution nowadays, which allows clients to be dumber while still rendering native components.
- madebysquares 8y ago
  That sounds interesting, source?
  - thsowers 8y ago
    Engineering manager of React denied this claim, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216628
    - vjeux 8y ago
      Note that the claim that was denied was Facebook moving away from React Native. Server-driven UI rendering and Litho/ComponentKit are also growing along with React Native. Facebook app has a big enough surface that it makes sense to have different rendering strategies for different use cases.
      - menckenjr 8y ago
        "Facebook app has a big enough surface that it makes sense to have different rendering strategies for different use cases." That's an odd statement. Playing mix-n-match with rendering strategies without a very clear UX justification for doing it is an invitation for designers and mediocre product people to indulge themselves at the expense of the overall UX.
      - joesb 8y ago
        Server-driven UI rendering and React-Native isn't mutual exclusive though. Server can still render a React-Component-tree-like structure that will then be used in the client to render the actual component in react native. This gives you ability to make some UI layout/theme adjustment from the server, which is good for A/B test. Doesn't means it goes back to rendering every view from the server on every interaction.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pizza 8y ago
  What would you say comes after RN?
  - tphan 8y ago
    Flutter?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    The realization that avoiding native brings more problems than it solves and that for CRUD apps mobile Web is good enough.
    - endless1234 8y ago
      Even boring CRUD apps might want e.g. push notifications.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        PWAs or WebSockets
- htormey 8y ago
  When I worked on the main iOS app at Facebook they used multiple solutions in parallel in the app (ComponentKit, AsyncDisplayKit, RN). So the fact that some projects are using some new server driven technology for some features doesn’t really prove anything. Unless they specifically announce they are dropping RN support from the app or you see a big drop off in pull request activity I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  It’s gone and for the better. The tipping point was the Airbnb blogpost.
  - yycfoofoo 8y ago
    lol. our team over here will be multitudes more productive than yours with react-native, so thanks for the leg up.
  - notsrg 8y ago
    If you actually read the full blog you'll realize it'll actually convince the right people to either adopt or avoid RN: >The path of a world that is 100% native or 100% React Native is relatively straightforward. but ultimately... hybrid apps are hard. Airbnb had a ton of infrastructure that needed porting over to RN that often required contributing upstream to fix issues they found. If you're starting from scratch you can get pretty far sticking to React/JS. imo I can't imagine a startup using anything other than RN (or react-native-web) because of how quickly you can build things.
    - xenospn 8y ago
      I built my startup using Ionic/Cordova (since certain APIs weren't available on RN). Now that iOS 12.2 beta is out, it is breaking certain APIs and leaving me no choice but to abandon the hybrid model. If anyone else out there is planning on doing anything other than a simple photo sharing/PWA app, don't bother with hybrid - you'll have to go Native at some point.
      - ryanbertrand 8y ago
        Can you expand on the APIs that broke for you?
  - turbo_fart_box 8y ago
    That's is just not true.
TheCoreh 8y ago
Interesting, I thought I had seen it mentioned somewhere (Twitter, I believe?) that hooks would only be available on v0.60. Excited to see them integrated so fast!
- onion2k 8y ago
  Nope. Hooks are in 0.59. https://twitter.com/reactnative/status/1093889810006200326?s=19 https://twitter.com/reactnative/status/1093889810006200326?s...
skluck 8y ago
I apologize for not really commenting on the content of the release, but I am shocked that it is on version 0.59. I wonder why they even bother with supposedly following semver at this point. 0.59? This seems to mean they can break anything at any point and it's technically still "following semver". I guess I just don't understand it. This library is used by thousands and consumed by millions (billions?). Why not just use dates as versions?
- terragon 8y ago
  Below 1.0.0, a minor release counts as a major one. So technically, 0.59 is a major upgrade from 0.58.
  - sscotth 8y ago
    You can also consider it: ArbitraryMarketing.Major.Patch
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
vjeux 8y ago
If you’re interested in all the big refactoring projects happening in React Native right now, there are summaries here: Fabric: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/4 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr... TurboModules: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/40 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr... Codegen: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/92 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr... JSI: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/91 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr...
matchbok 8y ago
Appreciate all the work FB is doing here, but RN is fundamentally never going to be a solution for most teams. The compounding problems (JS/swift/obj-c/java) and their dependencies in the build process demand that you hire native developers. That eliminates the #1 reason to use it. After 3 times using RN and having to go back to native... never again. When even simple things like navigation or animations take hours of research to get right.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  My experience building a couple of (fairly simple) apps on React Native has been amazingly productive and very pleasant dev experience. I've built a couple of toy apps in Swift directly and can honestly say that I find RN faster and easier. (And I'm neither a mobile dev nor a Javascript expert.) The hardest part for me was getting React-Navigation and RN-Web to play nicely together so I could have substantially one codebase for 3 platforms. That was admittedly a fair bit of googling and fiddling.
  - V-2 8y ago
    My experience (as a senior native Android dev) has been definitely bad so far. Configuration errors and inexplicable error messages popping up on a regular basis. The amount of troubleshooting it constantly required - instead of focusing on the task at hand - started to feel cumbersome after a week or two. Simplest functionality such as breakpoints would randomly stop working. All these problems aren't exclusive to me, I would pretty much always succeed in googling them up, usually along with dozens of solutions suggested by the community (each of them different). The documentation and tutorials leave a lot to be desired, too. A lot of this stuff is outdated, and the official documents are imprecise and feel like a draft (even when compared to what the much less mature Flutter brings to the table in this regard). Tooling is far behind what you get if you go native. Eg. support for refactoring, whatever editor you use, will be more than rudimentary and virtually nonexistent in comparison to what Android Studio offers. The same goes for unit testing / integration testing support, it's rather iffy. One of the more important UI Android features - Material transitions - is pretty much impossible to recreate in React Native. I also don't find JavaScript - even with TypeScript on - nearly as good a language as Kotlin. This isn't meant to be a rant: just an honest summary of my few weeks of experience fiddling with RN. You mention your native development was done in Swift; I heard that React Native is allegedly much more reliable for iOS than Android development. I can't really verify it either way, but potentially this might be why our mileages vary. The upsides? React Native pretty much abstracts away the lifecycle concerns, which are still a pain in the neck for a native Android dev. Hot reloading. No obsolete APIs maintained for backwards compatibility; understandably. Asynchronous programming is simple enough (although with Kotlin's coroutines arguably on their way to become the go-to solution on Android, it's not necessarily a win over native). Nothing else has impressed very much me so far. I used Xamarin for a commercial project once, and it felt considerably better, even though it was three years ago.
pvinis 8y ago
I'll just plug my repo here that helps with upgrading existing RN projects to new versions. https://github.com/pvinis/rn-diff-purge https://github.com/pvinis/rn-diff-purge
flaie 8y ago
RN has been such a big boost of productivity for us, it changed everything. We were able to onboard junior developers that are excited to work with it as well as keeping our at the time existing native developers enthusiast about it (they embraced it since), and the time to market for us have dramatically improved for new features on both iOS and Android. Of course some stuff sometimes doesn't work well, react-native link versus Pods, native modules or various SDK integration, navigation is sometimes tedious to work with but it is worth it really. I don't regret at all the choice of migrating our app to RN one year and a half ago.

64 points by saranshk 8y ago

I feel like the React Native fad has come and gone. Even FB is using their own server-driven UI solution nowadays, which allows clients to be dumber while still rendering native components.

madebysquares 8y ago
That sounds interesting, source?
- thsowers 8y ago
  Engineering manager of React denied this claim, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216628
  - vjeux 8y ago
    Note that the claim that was denied was Facebook moving away from React Native. Server-driven UI rendering and Litho/ComponentKit are also growing along with React Native. Facebook app has a big enough surface that it makes sense to have different rendering strategies for different use cases.
    - menckenjr 8y ago
      "Facebook app has a big enough surface that it makes sense to have different rendering strategies for different use cases." That's an odd statement. Playing mix-n-match with rendering strategies without a very clear UX justification for doing it is an invitation for designers and mediocre product people to indulge themselves at the expense of the overall UX.
    - joesb 8y ago
      Server-driven UI rendering and React-Native isn't mutual exclusive though. Server can still render a React-Component-tree-like structure that will then be used in the client to render the actual component in react native. This gives you ability to make some UI layout/theme adjustment from the server, which is good for A/B test. Doesn't means it goes back to rendering every view from the server on every interaction.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pizza 8y ago
What would you say comes after RN?
- tphan 8y ago
  Flutter?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  The realization that avoiding native brings more problems than it solves and that for CRUD apps mobile Web is good enough.
  - endless1234 8y ago
    Even boring CRUD apps might want e.g. push notifications.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      PWAs or WebSockets
htormey 8y ago
When I worked on the main iOS app at Facebook they used multiple solutions in parallel in the app (ComponentKit, AsyncDisplayKit, RN). So the fact that some projects are using some new server driven technology for some features doesn’t really prove anything. Unless they specifically announce they are dropping RN support from the app or you see a big drop off in pull request activity I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions.
aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
It’s gone and for the better. The tipping point was the Airbnb blogpost.
- yycfoofoo 8y ago
  lol. our team over here will be multitudes more productive than yours with react-native, so thanks for the leg up.
- notsrg 8y ago
  If you actually read the full blog you'll realize it'll actually convince the right people to either adopt or avoid RN: >The path of a world that is 100% native or 100% React Native is relatively straightforward. but ultimately... hybrid apps are hard. Airbnb had a ton of infrastructure that needed porting over to RN that often required contributing upstream to fix issues they found. If you're starting from scratch you can get pretty far sticking to React/JS. imo I can't imagine a startup using anything other than RN (or react-native-web) because of how quickly you can build things.
  - xenospn 8y ago
    I built my startup using Ionic/Cordova (since certain APIs weren't available on RN). Now that iOS 12.2 beta is out, it is breaking certain APIs and leaving me no choice but to abandon the hybrid model. If anyone else out there is planning on doing anything other than a simple photo sharing/PWA app, don't bother with hybrid - you'll have to go Native at some point.
    - ryanbertrand 8y ago
      Can you expand on the APIs that broke for you?
- turbo_fart_box 8y ago
  That's is just not true.

TheCoreh 8y ago

Interesting, I thought I had seen it mentioned somewhere (Twitter, I believe?) that hooks would only be available on v0.60. Excited to see them integrated so fast!

onion2k 8y ago
Nope. Hooks are in 0.59. https://twitter.com/reactnative/status/1093889810006200326?s=19 https://twitter.com/reactnative/status/1093889810006200326?s...

skluck 8y ago

I apologize for not really commenting on the content of the release, but I am shocked that it is on version 0.59. I wonder why they even bother with supposedly following semver at this point. 0.59? This seems to mean they can break anything at any point and it's technically still "following semver". I guess I just don't understand it. This library is used by thousands and consumed by millions (billions?). Why not just use dates as versions?

terragon 8y ago
Below 1.0.0, a minor release counts as a major one. So technically, 0.59 is a major upgrade from 0.58.
- sscotth 8y ago
  You can also consider it: ArbitraryMarketing.Major.Patch
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

vjeux 8y ago

If you’re interested in all the big refactoring projects happening in React Native right now, there are summaries here: Fabric: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/4 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr... TurboModules: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/40 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr... Codegen: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/92 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr... JSI: https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/91 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr...

matchbok 8y ago

Appreciate all the work FB is doing here, but RN is fundamentally never going to be a solution for most teams. The compounding problems (JS/swift/obj-c/java) and their dependencies in the build process demand that you hire native developers. That eliminates the #1 reason to use it. After 3 times using RN and having to go back to native... never again. When even simple things like navigation or animations take hours of research to get right.

sokoloff 8y ago
My experience building a couple of (fairly simple) apps on React Native has been amazingly productive and very pleasant dev experience. I've built a couple of toy apps in Swift directly and can honestly say that I find RN faster and easier. (And I'm neither a mobile dev nor a Javascript expert.) The hardest part for me was getting React-Navigation and RN-Web to play nicely together so I could have substantially one codebase for 3 platforms. That was admittedly a fair bit of googling and fiddling.
- V-2 8y ago
  My experience (as a senior native Android dev) has been definitely bad so far. Configuration errors and inexplicable error messages popping up on a regular basis. The amount of troubleshooting it constantly required - instead of focusing on the task at hand - started to feel cumbersome after a week or two. Simplest functionality such as breakpoints would randomly stop working. All these problems aren't exclusive to me, I would pretty much always succeed in googling them up, usually along with dozens of solutions suggested by the community (each of them different). The documentation and tutorials leave a lot to be desired, too. A lot of this stuff is outdated, and the official documents are imprecise and feel like a draft (even when compared to what the much less mature Flutter brings to the table in this regard). Tooling is far behind what you get if you go native. Eg. support for refactoring, whatever editor you use, will be more than rudimentary and virtually nonexistent in comparison to what Android Studio offers. The same goes for unit testing / integration testing support, it's rather iffy. One of the more important UI Android features - Material transitions - is pretty much impossible to recreate in React Native. I also don't find JavaScript - even with TypeScript on - nearly as good a language as Kotlin. This isn't meant to be a rant: just an honest summary of my few weeks of experience fiddling with RN. You mention your native development was done in Swift; I heard that React Native is allegedly much more reliable for iOS than Android development. I can't really verify it either way, but potentially this might be why our mileages vary. The upsides? React Native pretty much abstracts away the lifecycle concerns, which are still a pain in the neck for a native Android dev. Hot reloading. No obsolete APIs maintained for backwards compatibility; understandably. Asynchronous programming is simple enough (although with Kotlin's coroutines arguably on their way to become the go-to solution on Android, it's not necessarily a win over native). Nothing else has impressed very much me so far. I used Xamarin for a commercial project once, and it felt considerably better, even though it was three years ago.

pvinis 8y ago

I'll just plug my repo here that helps with upgrading existing RN projects to new versions. https://github.com/pvinis/rn-diff-purge https://github.com/pvinis/rn-diff-purge

flaie 8y ago

RN has been such a big boost of productivity for us, it changed everything. We were able to onboard junior developers that are excited to work with it as well as keeping our at the time existing native developers enthusiast about it (they embraced it since), and the time to market for us have dramatically improved for new features on both iOS and Android. Of course some stuff sometimes doesn't work well, react-native link versus Pods, native modules or various SDK integration, navigation is sometimes tedious to work with but it is worth it really. I don't regret at all the choice of migrating our app to RN one year and a half ago.