24 ms·

React Native for Windows and Mac

715 points by ed 6y ago

ed 6y ago
MacOS implementation here https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos
billions 6y ago
React Native seems to be quickly becoming the standard for fast development coupled with native integration
- jeremyis 6y ago
  If only it were stable
- deadmutex 6y ago
  Does Facebook use it?
  - outside1234 6y ago
    Yes
    - msrmthehomeless 6y ago
      Only for its marketplace app
      - sophiebits 6y ago
        This isn’t true.
        msrmthehomeless 6y ago
        Oh? I heard that's the only one from someone I know who worked on RN there
rafamvc 6y ago
Flutter seems to be gaining ground on React Native. And they also have web and desktop ports. Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
  Any other evidence? I don't "feel" this, flutter seems to be floundering from what I've seen.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bsaul 6y ago
    Same feeling here. still waiting for that killer flutter app to convince me one can actually build a real app with decent latency in flutter
    - chirau 6y ago
      What do you mean by killer exactly? Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.
      - wtetzner 6y ago
        A killer app is something like Rails. Rails made Ruby popular, because it was so good that people who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in Ruby were willing to use it for the benefits they got from Rails.
        satvikpendem 6y ago
        I suppose Flutter is Dart's killer app, since you're comparing frameworks and languages. Rails is to Ruby as Flutter is to Dart, as it were. I suggest you give it a try. Personally, this felt like the "killer" feature to me, fully advanced animations that I'm not sure are possible on native widget based frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8
qppo 6y ago
I'd love to abandon my C/C++ UI frameworks for React, but I need - consistent rendering/support across multiple platforms and versions - multiple windows - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered or created by the framework Can I do that all in React native? Edit: don't need to bring up electron.
- whb07 6y ago
  Wasm
  - nikivi 6y ago
    With WASM though you will still have to have the app be deployed within browser context. Thus losing hotkeys to the browser etc Or you can build native WASM apps?
    - unsignedint 6y ago
      That's probably where Blazor is eventually heading to? There seems to be some preview on the mobile native, though, it's probably not strictly a WASM as it provides binding through Xamarin...[0] [0]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/mobile-blazor-bindings-feb-2020-update/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/mobile-blazor-bindings...
    - whb07 6y ago
      No actually. There are projects that can run in a server. The spec doesn’t say anything about web only.
  - millstone 6y ago
    That's absurd; if you're shipping a native app you can compile native code.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  what the heck is that third one about?
igravious 6y ago
Excuse my ignorance. What's new about this? I thought React Native was already a thing?
- filoleg 6y ago
  React Native was a thing for native mobile app development. The post is talking about React Native becoming available for native desktop app development.
  - BHSPitMonkey 6y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11386595 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11490190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11490190
    - contextfree 6y ago
      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#)
  - igravious 6y ago
    Much obliged!
- pugworthy 6y ago
  React Native at least only advertises that it only supports Android + iOS, whereas this adds "PCs, tablets, 2-in-1s, Xbox, Mixed reality devices, etc., as well as the MacOS desktop and laptop ecosystems"
  - igravious 6y ago
    Thanking you kindly!
wyc 6y ago
React Native scares me with its dependency webs: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native 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 ground where we can create a tight microkernel-like thing natively using secure enclaves and key managers, but expose an API to the "untrusted" parts of the program. This approach is not without its own downsides, such as dark patterns in a compromised UI. However, as one friend pointed out, a lot of those deps are indeed for build time only, which have different risk profiles. The depgraph of reactjs is far simpler and easier for me to understand and therefore feel trust: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react Does anyone know if there has been reliable research towards the security of the entire RN dependency tree? Seeing a stray dep there that has 1 maintainer on npm/GitHub who has been inactive for over a year makes me nervous. Any one of those JavaScript projects could do something nefarious deep under the hood, and this to me seems to expose a huge surface area for attackers. Here's a classic throwback to keep us on our toes :) https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
- peterhunt 6y ago
  Wow, that React Native dep graph is crazy! But as I browse it, most of the dependencies seem to be build-time, not runtime dependencies (i.e. it seems like most of them are related to Babel). The React comparison doesn't include dev dependencies. While react-native does have more dependencies than vanilla react, on first glance the list doesn't seem too crazy https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/package.json#L87 https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/package...
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    The package.json file hasn't been remotely close to representative of the actual dependency count of a JS project for years.
szhu 6y ago
I think the killer feature here is natively targeting Windows AND macOS simultaneously. The only cross-platform alternatives that I've seen in the ecosystem use either web or Gtk in the frontend, and both of these have a distinctly non-native feel to them.
- int_19h 6y ago
  In which ecosystem? If you mean desktop apps in general, then there are many other options. Qt and wxWidgets, to name a couple of popular ones that have been around for a very long time.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    My problem with those two is the damn C++ API. I’ve used both in the past, but I’ve moved on from C++ for desktop applications to greener pastures but these toolkits’ APIs are a pita to use via ffi.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      They're both pretty popular to wrap; I'm surprised that whatever language/ecosystem you're using doesn't have a wrapper lib already.
- fmxexpress 6y ago
  Delphi does this. GDI+/DirectX on Windows, OpenGL on macOS, and GTK+ on Linux (and OpenGL on Android and iOS). Single source responsive UI.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jcelerier 6y ago
  nice, means that Qt apps fit well enough that you don't even notice them :p
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  The latest Xamarin is no longer mobile-only for Windows and might potentially fit the bill here.
yoloClin 6y ago
Is anyone able to provide a map of modern frameworks? With React-native, React-redux, Angular, Vue and probably a bunch of others. I'm really not sure what's relevant now and what was relevant 6 months ago. I'm genuinely curious, but it's pretty difficult to grasp and no framework homepage is going to tell you "Don't use me, I'm about to be a dead project!" and every developer will tell you their preferred framework is the best framework.
- chadlavi 6y ago
  I can provide you with a short video clip of spaghetti falling through the air, it's functionally equivalent
- iarejenius 6y ago
  I don't know how often a project dies because it has planned obsolescence vs. people stop using and updating it, but for the latter case I think https://2019.stateofjs.com/ https://2019.stateofjs.com/ is pretty great.
  - yoloClin 6y ago
    Thanks, that's exactly what I want!
- nicoburns 6y ago
  React, Angular, and Vue are the big 3 web frameworks. Of which React is still more popular than the others I believe, and it takes a slightly different approach. While Angular and Vue use string-templating DSLs to control rendering, React uses JSX which is a thin syntax sugar over JavaScript (and allows you to mix JavaScript in with it). React is also more functional. In practice I find this makes it more flexible, and easier to debug. Angular and Vue are very similar, but Vue has the reputation of being simpler while Angular is the Enterprise Java of the web view. There are a bunch of others that are less popular such as Ember, Svelte, and Inferno which are also decent in their own right, but the ecosystem of libraries around them is smaller. The most important libraries to know about in the React ecosystem are React-Router for routing, and either Redux or MobX for state management. There are other options, and for small apps you could get away without a state management library, but these are the mainstream options. I'm not super-up on the Angular/Vue ecosystems, but I believe they're more integrated (e.g. they provide more first-party libraries). Almost everyone who is using these frameworks is also using either Babel or TypeScript together with Webpack for bundling. There are other options for bundling such as Parcel and Rollup, and again it is possible to get away without bundling or transpiling if you really want to, but Webpack is still the mainstream option for applications (Rollup is well-suited to libraries). React-native is a different beast. It's a cross-platform mobile (and now desktop) framework rather than a web-based one. It uses React executed in a JavaScript VM to control rendering, but it renders native mobile UI toolkits. There are similar projects for Vue and Angular, but unlike the web versions which are competitive with React, they are nowhere near as mature. React-native's real competition for cross-platform mobile development is Flutter. Flutter is written using that Dart language, and takes a different to React-Native. Rather than compiling down to native UI widgets, it custom-renders everything. This makes it more reliable and consistent across platforms, but also more limited in what you can because you can't hook into the existing ecosystem of native ios/android libraries nearly so easily. My subjective view on this is that React-Native is just about on the cusp of reaching maturity, while Flutter doesn't quite seem to have enough momentum to reach the mainstream. Although I'd love to be proven wrong on that one.
brdd 6y ago
I'm really excited, although the Mac part of this page is somewhat misleading — there isn't anything available on the Mac side yet (everything is "coming soon")
- manquer 6y ago
  you can checkout the code here https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos. It still being actively developed and not yet ready for release.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- acoates 6y ago
  react-native-macos is available today. The documentation is linked on the sidebar: https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/docs/next/rnm-getting-started https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/docs/next/r...
willswire 6y ago
Not sure what the advantage here is over Electron. I know the chromium engine is a resource hog, but the scalability/mix between platforms makes it worth it. Curious to know what your thoughts are folks!
- monadic2 6y ago
  > Not sure what the advantage here is over Electron. You can customize per-platform to provide a better experience than the web can offer.
- hpen 6y ago
  EDITED React native's GUI compiles to native code. Or something like that. It is very different from Electron.
  - iainmerrick 6y ago
    No, React Native still uses Javascript, not “native code”. It’s different in that it doesn’t use HTML or CSS (which is a major difference, sure).
    - gitgud 6y ago
      Does React Native use V8 internally then?
      - snazz 6y ago
        It uses JavaScriptCore on iOS because that's the Apple-blessed JS engine. On Android it bundles its own copy of JavaScriptCore.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      It uses a combination of both JS and native code. That JS that RN calls ultimately makes calls out to native Andriod and iOS (and Windows, and macOS) APIs that are compiled to Java and ObjC/Swift (and, I assume, C#?). All of RN's targeted platforms leverage scripting bridges for JS, but only a portion of the actual running code is JS, the part that's native is (usually, but not exclusively) generalized.
markharper 6y ago
What would be the benefit over electron?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hpen 6y ago
  1. Not using the DOM for rendering. 2. Integrating native APIs is much easier.
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    > Being compiled to native code is a huge benefit. It's still just running Javascript. The real difference is that it uses widgets that are native to the platform, instead of a browser engine/DOM.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      It's not "just" running JS, it's also running JS. Part of the control flow into and out of the native widgets is JS, and part of it is abstractions over scripting bridges employed by RN (and its various forks).
chadlavi 6y ago
I swear to gosh Facebook, if you tempt my employer into making me write Windows apps...
- hpen 6y ago
  I would be happy to add Windows as a platform to my apps. More market == more money. Only as an add-on. I wouldn't want to write Windows exclusive apps for sure.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Not meant to disparage, but how lucrative is that market? How much do Windows users (outside of business) actually spend on software (regardless of business model)? It's a leading question, but a sincere one.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Who buys software outside of businesses? God I feel like I haven’t paid for a stand-alone piece of software in years.
      - eyelidlessness 6y ago
        I do. Not a ton, but enough to be a part of the drop in the bucket that makes the Apple ecosystem more attractive to smaller-purchase businesses that target it. I just... haven't seen much of that targeting Windows for a long time.
    - hpen 6y ago
      That's a good question. There doesn't seem to be much outside of famous software like the Adobe suite. That's excluding business of course. Most apps I want to make are business facing. However, I believe in web first for most of those ventures. Only making "native" apps if they're really wanted.
freewizard 6y ago
There was a community effort[1] with similar goal on macOS. I was a tiny bit disappointed that they stopped working on it when Apple announced Project Catalyst. It's good to have MS carrying the touch on this topic. [1] https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos
pier25 6y ago
Didn't Microsoft use RN for building Skype or did I dream that?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Skype is Electron now.
  - contextfree 6y ago
    The previous version of Skype was based on an older, internal-only fork of RN for Windows.
albertTJames 6y ago
Today an Electron wept
satvikpendem 6y ago
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 worked", on all the platforms I tested it on: web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Updates on one are hot reloaded to another. In contrast, Expo sometimes just broke. This was all wrapped up in one package instead of needing to use separate build chains for each platform. I wonder if React Native can do all of this officially, but I suppose that's not their prerogative, given that RN is mostly used by Facebook for apps and these other platform efforts are by third parties, like Microsoft here.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  > 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.
  - crazypython 6y ago
    React Native isn't afraid to expose platform specific details when abstracting away cross platform APIs in uniform APIs. In my experience, it was fairly easy to use a native UI library inside a React Native app. (It takes more work to embed a React Native view inside a native view that's embedded in a react native view, but it's possible.)
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    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.
  - 6y ago
FpUser 6y ago
They supply short Counter example and claim they're both the same. However looking at the code button handler called onClick for react and onPress in React Native. Unless this is a simple typo why doing crazy things like that?
shmerl 6y ago
No Linux support.
- justinmcp 6y ago
  You could try moving https://github.com/justinmcp/react-native/tree/ubuntu https://github.com/justinmcp/react-native/tree/ubuntu forward. I no longer have the time.
- abacadaba 6y ago
  Sounds crazy to say this, and I've had mostly positive experiences working with React Native, but sure hope everyone keeps using Electron.
ipsum2 6y ago
On the React Native MacOS fork: > This repository is a working fork of facebook/react-native that adds support for the official React Native for macOS implementation from Microsoft. Does anyone know when these changes are planning to be upstreamed?
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  RN's been available for many years, and little interest has been shown in providing first class support for desktop targets. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if: 1. the recent FB messenger desktop apps are RN. 2. they leverage work done in forks (like this one from MS) to achieve that.
ARandomerDude 6y ago
> Windows > We are actively developing React Native for Windows... > Mac > Coming soon So React Native for Windows.
- olyjohn 6y ago
  Don't forget... Microsoft <3 Linux. You can tell it's a top consideration.
  - snazz 6y ago
    They don't <3 desktop Linux and probably never will. To them, Windows and macOS are the major desktop operating systems, and Linux is the server operating system. VS Code likely only runs on Linux because Electron runs on Linux.
  - cutler 6y ago
    Yeah, MS's <3 for Linux started with their patent racket aimed at Red Hat and Suse. Let's also not forget their bankrolling of SCO's anti-Linux lawsuits in the 00s. "So sharing, so caring".
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  It’s literally linked to from that page, just not ready for release: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos
tphan 6y ago
I've used React Native for a client and, whilst it was super clunky, I still enjoyed being able to write React to deploy to mobile. With React Native for Web, you can technical write code that writes to a bunch of different platforms, a big selling point for businesses.
- yesimahuman 6y ago
  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.
  - crazypython 6y ago
    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 https://github.com/wix/react-native-navigation is beautiful, it uses iOS' own navigation APIs, but it's a pain.
    - yesimahuman 6y ago
      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).
ShaneMcGowan 6y ago
React Native for Xbox seems like a step in the complete wrong direction...
- cbhl 6y ago
  Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by the Xbox and game controller in the header. (I mean, sure, it "just" runs Windows, but...)
zapzupnz 6y ago
I'd love to see some dog-fooding on this. Maybe a branch of VS Code for RN. I mean, say what you will about the quality of even Apple's own Catalyst apps, but at least they eat their own dogfood (although with the unfortunate consequence of making us eat it, too). There are so many different competing projects at MS to do practically the same thing, it'd be great to see RN for Windows and macOS used for something major from MS.
- sophiebits 6y ago
  Last I heard, they are using it for at least significant parts of Office and Skype.
jonbronson 6y ago
Unfortunately, `Good First Issue` and `help wanted` sections are currently empty for the macOS fork.
AbuAssar 6y ago
The mac related lib and docs are still ComingSoonTM
jasonhansel 6y ago
Of course, no Linux support, since this is still Microsoft :(
- johnghanks 6y ago
  Classic HN - never anything positive to say about any story here.
djabatt 6y ago
The web site reads "Mac coming soon" the headline reads differently.
natch 6y ago
React Native is best understood as an insurgent attack on native mobile platforms, funded by overwealthy and bloated companies that do not control mobile platforms, but feel entitled. Microsoft and Facebook attacking Apple and Google basically. IMHO it's not a sincere effort to make a nice platform. It moves fast and breaks things in major ways with each minor point release, with the current excuse being that it's not at 1.0 yet. But it offers just enough to introduce FUD into the competitors' ecosystems. And that's the entire goal as far as I can tell. If you value getting useful deep knowledge, stay away. If you want to play in the shallows and be patching stuff up all the time with JavaScript/TypeScript, React Native is an option.
- rosywoozlechan 6y ago
  How are Facebook and Microsoft any more or less "bloated" than Google or Apple? Also Discord's iOS app is built with ReactNative, and it is a pretty feature rich application, seems like it works for those use it.
  - natch 6y ago
    They have lots of money but without carrying the cost of maintaining an active hardware product line. Unless you count Oculus for Facebook and a few minor things for Microsoft but those are in the noise.
unnouinceput 6y ago
. (dot) (ignore me, I need this comment to comeback to it in the future)
iainmerrick 6y ago
I asked this on a previous React Native thread, and I’m still curious: is RN (on mobile, as that’s where it’s currently used) actually faster than something like PhoneGap? Are there any benchmarks or demos? Anyone got any anecdotes of a like-for-like comparison? I’m skeptical (though certainly willing to be convinced) because RN runs your JS application in a separate thread from the UI, with a rather expensive bridge sending JSON messages back and forth. That seems to me a poor design choice. Browsers have the downside of working with the complex DOM that doesn’t map as well to native widgets. But browsers are mature and highly optimized. So I would guess that performance might be a wash.
- firloop 6y ago
  Performance is just one reason companies adapt something like React Native, the ability to have web developers* come in and string native-quality components together is another. React Native can feel better than mobile web and have access to lower level APIs. * I think this is more of a selling point than a reality. I think in practice, to make a React Native feel and work well requires native platform knowledge.
- KuhlMensch 6y ago
  Yes its faster, for majority of cases. But if you overload the bridge, you not only hit a bottleneck, you hit an async bottleneck between your UI code and native. Very rare for that to happen in my experience, and well worth the trade-off.
m_mueller 6y ago
Why is Microsoft doing this instead of Facebook?
dep_b 6y ago
Those JavaScript cross-platform solutions are opaque boxes that run basically their own operating system within an operating system. This comes at a penalty of a non-standard UX and higher than usual CPU usage and memory usage. But after they tackled that hurdle (like Visual Studio Code, excellent work), they still lack a lot of platform standard goodies like Accessibility and AppleScript. I prefer solutions like Xamarin / Mono where you can have a Cocoa UI coupled with C# or F# based dll's. Let's be honest, as long as you have a good way of maintaining a good state in your app for example by already using ViewModels that did most of the heavy lifting like formatting strings, having the state in a state machine and so on, getting the UI to work as required is just an exercise of filling in the colors between the lines. Barely anyone would notice they were using a Xamarin based solution on a Mac, while the JS based applications are immediately really obvious to the trained eye.
- techntoke 6y ago
  It's almost like people want a new markup language for defining interfaces that isn't based on JavaScript.
langitbiru 6y ago
A decade ago, Java was the de-facto language to build a cross-platform desktop application (with Java Swing). Now it is JavaScript. So be it then.... Too bad Rust does not have something similar.
jbverschoor 6y ago
Only a matter of months before VSCode will not be an electron app anymore.
SZJX 6y ago
Looked at it a while ago when I was trying to start a cross-platform app (both on mobile and on desktop), but under the Mac section it simply said "Coming Soon!". I thought there's some update with this post receiving so many upvotes, but apparently it's still the same, and Mac support is still in a very early experimental stage. Flutter left me a similar impression. I eventually ended up using Quasar https://quasar.dev/ https://quasar.dev/, which allows you to use one Vue.js codebase but deploy to Cordova on mobile and Electron on desktop. Vue is definitely not the prettiest solution out there, but I had to be practical and actually get the app out. Maybe if I started the project one year in the future, the landscape would be totally different already. It's definitely changing rapidly.
- chimp_brain 6y ago
  I think I might be on the same boat. I have personally looked into all frameworks and planning to hire a team, quasar seems is one of the options. The application isn't for any mission-critical application, revolves around curd. Quasar is a good option albeit with a lot of baggage, Flutter is clean but for Desktop use case it's still evolving. How was your experience with Quasar? Would you recommend Flutter over Quasar?
Etheryte 6y ago
While personally I dislike React Native in the strongest terms possible for the number of nigh impossible to debug technical issues it has brought the projects that tried to tame it, there is a really interesting moment happening here. Microsoft is embracing Facebook's cross-platform tools to eventually compete with Google's cross-platform Electron. Microsoft currently relies on Google for the internals of VS Code, Github for Desktop and many more of its popular pieces of kit, and it doesn't seem very happy about it. My own experience with React Native has been nothing but terrible, but it will be interesting to see how all of this will play out in the long run.
- nailer 6y ago
  V8, Chromium and Blink are an Open Source projects that Google is one of the main contributors to, but they're not 'Google'. If Google went away tomorrow, V8, Chromium and Blink would still exist, and Microsoft would be able to use all projects.
  - Etheryte 6y ago
    The problem isn't the projects going away, more so that Microsoft has no control over where those projects are headed. If Electron moves in a direction that works well for Google but not so well for Microsoft, they can't do much about it unless they want to pick up maintaining a full fork.
    - nailer 6y ago
      Google doesn't care about Electron, much like they don't care about node.js, despite those projects relying on tech Google contributes to. Whereas Microsoft does care about Electron.
  - biggestdecision 6y ago
    Sure they are open source projects, but the majority of dev work is done on Google's dime. Google employs many of the most important people in these projects. Sure the code will still be there if Google gives up, but will anyone have the capacity to step up and maintain them?
parshua 6y ago
I wish someone would take a web renderer, took the Javascript away, made a native react-like library for it, and made a universal interface to it so any language could use it. That would finally fix the problem with the UI building issue, while allowing flexible language access. That would be the best of both worlds.
- tsukurimashou 6y ago
  sounds a lot like what wasm is trying to achieve (minus the web rendering part)
EastSmith 6y ago
I looked at the docs, and checked the Calculator demo app. It a Visual Studio solution. I will not install Visual Studio because each time I install it (last time it was 5 years back now), my Windows Installation gets polluted with all kinds of packages that I now never ever been able to figure out how to uninstall. I can copy couple of dlls in a project folder, and run npm / yarn install, but that is the most I am willing to do. So, my question is: is there a VS Code / npm only demo? As an ex-windows developer, turned react dev - I am excited.
Bellamy 6y ago
React Native is getting better all the time and it's mature already. I think people who criticize RN are the devs who had to work with the first few shitty versions of RN in a shitty complex project. I think that's the case in many, if not all, open source projects. We do pretty complex stuff with RN as does Facebook and it's been serving us well. I don't know why someone would want to use it with Windows, but this tells how far the project has gotten. I would love to developed native, but you just save a lot (maybe half) time using RN if you need the app for both platforms.
OzzyB 6y ago
> React Native for Windows and Mac > Mac: Coming Soon You know what, I think I'll wait for Flutter Desktop, or see who wins true cross-desktop compatibilty since Flutter already has Mac support but no Windows.
mister_hn 6y ago
Where's the Linux one?

715 points by ed 6y ago

ed 6y ago

MacOS implementation here https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos

billions 6y ago

React Native seems to be quickly becoming the standard for fast development coupled with native integration

jeremyis 6y ago
If only it were stable
deadmutex 6y ago
Does Facebook use it?
- outside1234 6y ago
  Yes
  - msrmthehomeless 6y ago
    Only for its marketplace app
    - sophiebits 6y ago
      This isn’t true.
      - msrmthehomeless 6y ago
        Oh? I heard that's the only one from someone I know who worked on RN there

rafamvc 6y ago

Flutter seems to be gaining ground on React Native. And they also have web and desktop ports. Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends.

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
Any other evidence? I don't "feel" this, flutter seems to be floundering from what I've seen.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bsaul 6y ago
  Same feeling here. still waiting for that killer flutter app to convince me one can actually build a real app with decent latency in flutter
  - chirau 6y ago
    What do you mean by killer exactly? Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.
    - wtetzner 6y ago
      A killer app is something like Rails. Rails made Ruby popular, because it was so good that people who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in Ruby were willing to use it for the benefits they got from Rails.
      - satvikpendem 6y ago
        I suppose Flutter is Dart's killer app, since you're comparing frameworks and languages. Rails is to Ruby as Flutter is to Dart, as it were. I suggest you give it a try. Personally, this felt like the "killer" feature to me, fully advanced animations that I'm not sure are possible on native widget based frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8

qppo 6y ago

I'd love to abandon my C/C++ UI frameworks for React, but I need - consistent rendering/support across multiple platforms and versions - multiple windows - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered or created by the framework Can I do that all in React native? Edit: don't need to bring up electron.

whb07 6y ago
Wasm
- nikivi 6y ago
  With WASM though you will still have to have the app be deployed within browser context. Thus losing hotkeys to the browser etc Or you can build native WASM apps?
  - unsignedint 6y ago
    That's probably where Blazor is eventually heading to? There seems to be some preview on the mobile native, though, it's probably not strictly a WASM as it provides binding through Xamarin...[0] [0]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/mobile-blazor-bindings-feb-2020-update/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/mobile-blazor-bindings...
  - whb07 6y ago
    No actually. There are projects that can run in a server. The spec doesn’t say anything about web only.
- millstone 6y ago
  That's absurd; if you're shipping a native app you can compile native code.
metalliqaz 6y ago
what the heck is that third one about?

igravious 6y ago

Excuse my ignorance. What's new about this? I thought React Native was already a thing?

filoleg 6y ago
React Native was a thing for native mobile app development. The post is talking about React Native becoming available for native desktop app development.
- BHSPitMonkey 6y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11386595 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11490190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11490190
  - contextfree 6y ago
    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#)
- igravious 6y ago
  Much obliged!
pugworthy 6y ago
React Native at least only advertises that it only supports Android + iOS, whereas this adds "PCs, tablets, 2-in-1s, Xbox, Mixed reality devices, etc., as well as the MacOS desktop and laptop ecosystems"
- igravious 6y ago
  Thanking you kindly!

wyc 6y ago

React Native scares me with its dependency webs: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native 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 ground where we can create a tight microkernel-like thing natively using secure enclaves and key managers, but expose an API to the "untrusted" parts of the program. This approach is not without its own downsides, such as dark patterns in a compromised UI. However, as one friend pointed out, a lot of those deps are indeed for build time only, which have different risk profiles. The depgraph of reactjs is far simpler and easier for me to understand and therefore feel trust: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react Does anyone know if there has been reliable research towards the security of the entire RN dependency tree? Seeing a stray dep there that has 1 maintainer on npm/GitHub who has been inactive for over a year makes me nervous. Any one of those JavaScript projects could do something nefarious deep under the hood, and this to me seems to expose a huge surface area for attackers. Here's a classic throwback to keep us on our toes :) https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html

peterhunt 6y ago
Wow, that React Native dep graph is crazy! But as I browse it, most of the dependencies seem to be build-time, not runtime dependencies (i.e. it seems like most of them are related to Babel). The React comparison doesn't include dev dependencies. While react-native does have more dependencies than vanilla react, on first glance the list doesn't seem too crazy https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/package.json#L87 https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/package...
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  The package.json file hasn't been remotely close to representative of the actual dependency count of a JS project for years.

szhu 6y ago

I think the killer feature here is natively targeting Windows AND macOS simultaneously. The only cross-platform alternatives that I've seen in the ecosystem use either web or Gtk in the frontend, and both of these have a distinctly non-native feel to them.

int_19h 6y ago
In which ecosystem? If you mean desktop apps in general, then there are many other options. Qt and wxWidgets, to name a couple of popular ones that have been around for a very long time.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  My problem with those two is the damn C++ API. I’ve used both in the past, but I’ve moved on from C++ for desktop applications to greener pastures but these toolkits’ APIs are a pita to use via ffi.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    They're both pretty popular to wrap; I'm surprised that whatever language/ecosystem you're using doesn't have a wrapper lib already.
fmxexpress 6y ago
Delphi does this. GDI+/DirectX on Windows, OpenGL on macOS, and GTK+ on Linux (and OpenGL on Android and iOS). Single source responsive UI.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jcelerier 6y ago
nice, means that Qt apps fit well enough that you don't even notice them :p
ComputerGuru 6y ago
The latest Xamarin is no longer mobile-only for Windows and might potentially fit the bill here.

yoloClin 6y ago

Is anyone able to provide a map of modern frameworks? With React-native, React-redux, Angular, Vue and probably a bunch of others. I'm really not sure what's relevant now and what was relevant 6 months ago. I'm genuinely curious, but it's pretty difficult to grasp and no framework homepage is going to tell you "Don't use me, I'm about to be a dead project!" and every developer will tell you their preferred framework is the best framework.

chadlavi 6y ago
I can provide you with a short video clip of spaghetti falling through the air, it's functionally equivalent
iarejenius 6y ago
I don't know how often a project dies because it has planned obsolescence vs. people stop using and updating it, but for the latter case I think https://2019.stateofjs.com/ https://2019.stateofjs.com/ is pretty great.
- yoloClin 6y ago
  Thanks, that's exactly what I want!
nicoburns 6y ago
React, Angular, and Vue are the big 3 web frameworks. Of which React is still more popular than the others I believe, and it takes a slightly different approach. While Angular and Vue use string-templating DSLs to control rendering, React uses JSX which is a thin syntax sugar over JavaScript (and allows you to mix JavaScript in with it). React is also more functional. In practice I find this makes it more flexible, and easier to debug. Angular and Vue are very similar, but Vue has the reputation of being simpler while Angular is the Enterprise Java of the web view. There are a bunch of others that are less popular such as Ember, Svelte, and Inferno which are also decent in their own right, but the ecosystem of libraries around them is smaller. The most important libraries to know about in the React ecosystem are React-Router for routing, and either Redux or MobX for state management. There are other options, and for small apps you could get away without a state management library, but these are the mainstream options. I'm not super-up on the Angular/Vue ecosystems, but I believe they're more integrated (e.g. they provide more first-party libraries). Almost everyone who is using these frameworks is also using either Babel or TypeScript together with Webpack for bundling. There are other options for bundling such as Parcel and Rollup, and again it is possible to get away without bundling or transpiling if you really want to, but Webpack is still the mainstream option for applications (Rollup is well-suited to libraries). React-native is a different beast. It's a cross-platform mobile (and now desktop) framework rather than a web-based one. It uses React executed in a JavaScript VM to control rendering, but it renders native mobile UI toolkits. There are similar projects for Vue and Angular, but unlike the web versions which are competitive with React, they are nowhere near as mature. React-native's real competition for cross-platform mobile development is Flutter. Flutter is written using that Dart language, and takes a different to React-Native. Rather than compiling down to native UI widgets, it custom-renders everything. This makes it more reliable and consistent across platforms, but also more limited in what you can because you can't hook into the existing ecosystem of native ios/android libraries nearly so easily. My subjective view on this is that React-Native is just about on the cusp of reaching maturity, while Flutter doesn't quite seem to have enough momentum to reach the mainstream. Although I'd love to be proven wrong on that one.

brdd 6y ago

I'm really excited, although the Mac part of this page is somewhat misleading — there isn't anything available on the Mac side yet (everything is "coming soon")

manquer 6y ago
you can checkout the code here https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos. It still being actively developed and not yet ready for release.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
acoates 6y ago
react-native-macos is available today. The documentation is linked on the sidebar: https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/docs/next/rnm-getting-started https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/docs/next/r...

willswire 6y ago

Not sure what the advantage here is over Electron. I know the chromium engine is a resource hog, but the scalability/mix between platforms makes it worth it. Curious to know what your thoughts are folks!

monadic2 6y ago
> Not sure what the advantage here is over Electron. You can customize per-platform to provide a better experience than the web can offer.
hpen 6y ago
EDITED React native's GUI compiles to native code. Or something like that. It is very different from Electron.
- iainmerrick 6y ago
  No, React Native still uses Javascript, not “native code”. It’s different in that it doesn’t use HTML or CSS (which is a major difference, sure).
  - gitgud 6y ago
    Does React Native use V8 internally then?
    - snazz 6y ago
      It uses JavaScriptCore on iOS because that's the Apple-blessed JS engine. On Android it bundles its own copy of JavaScriptCore.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    It uses a combination of both JS and native code. That JS that RN calls ultimately makes calls out to native Andriod and iOS (and Windows, and macOS) APIs that are compiled to Java and ObjC/Swift (and, I assume, C#?). All of RN's targeted platforms leverage scripting bridges for JS, but only a portion of the actual running code is JS, the part that's native is (usually, but not exclusively) generalized.

markharper 6y ago

What would be the benefit over electron?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hpen 6y ago
1. Not using the DOM for rendering. 2. Integrating native APIs is much easier.
- wtetzner 6y ago
  > Being compiled to native code is a huge benefit. It's still just running Javascript. The real difference is that it uses widgets that are native to the platform, instead of a browser engine/DOM.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    It's not "just" running JS, it's also running JS. Part of the control flow into and out of the native widgets is JS, and part of it is abstractions over scripting bridges employed by RN (and its various forks).

chadlavi 6y ago

I swear to gosh Facebook, if you tempt my employer into making me write Windows apps...

hpen 6y ago
I would be happy to add Windows as a platform to my apps. More market == more money. Only as an add-on. I wouldn't want to write Windows exclusive apps for sure.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Not meant to disparage, but how lucrative is that market? How much do Windows users (outside of business) actually spend on software (regardless of business model)? It's a leading question, but a sincere one.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Who buys software outside of businesses? God I feel like I haven’t paid for a stand-alone piece of software in years.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      I do. Not a ton, but enough to be a part of the drop in the bucket that makes the Apple ecosystem more attractive to smaller-purchase businesses that target it. I just... haven't seen much of that targeting Windows for a long time.
  - hpen 6y ago
    That's a good question. There doesn't seem to be much outside of famous software like the Adobe suite. That's excluding business of course. Most apps I want to make are business facing. However, I believe in web first for most of those ventures. Only making "native" apps if they're really wanted.

freewizard 6y ago

There was a community effort[1] with similar goal on macOS. I was a tiny bit disappointed that they stopped working on it when Apple announced Project Catalyst. It's good to have MS carrying the touch on this topic. [1] https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos

pier25 6y ago

Didn't Microsoft use RN for building Skype or did I dream that?

saagarjha 6y ago
Skype is Electron now.
- contextfree 6y ago
  The previous version of Skype was based on an older, internal-only fork of RN for Windows.

albertTJames 6y ago

Today an Electron wept

satvikpendem 6y ago

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 worked", on all the platforms I tested it on: web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Updates on one are hot reloaded to another. In contrast, Expo sometimes just broke. This was all wrapped up in one package instead of needing to use separate build chains for each platform. I wonder if React Native can do all of this officially, but I suppose that's not their prerogative, given that RN is mostly used by Facebook for apps and these other platform efforts are by third parties, like Microsoft here.

_bxg1 6y ago
> 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.
- crazypython 6y ago
  React Native isn't afraid to expose platform specific details when abstracting away cross platform APIs in uniform APIs. In my experience, it was fairly easy to use a native UI library inside a React Native app. (It takes more work to embed a React Native view inside a native view that's embedded in a react native view, but it's possible.)
- satvikpendem 6y ago
  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.
- 6y ago

FpUser 6y ago

They supply short Counter example and claim they're both the same. However looking at the code button handler called onClick for react and onPress in React Native. Unless this is a simple typo why doing crazy things like that?

shmerl 6y ago

No Linux support.

justinmcp 6y ago
You could try moving https://github.com/justinmcp/react-native/tree/ubuntu https://github.com/justinmcp/react-native/tree/ubuntu forward. I no longer have the time.
abacadaba 6y ago
Sounds crazy to say this, and I've had mostly positive experiences working with React Native, but sure hope everyone keeps using Electron.

ipsum2 6y ago

On the React Native MacOS fork: > This repository is a working fork of facebook/react-native that adds support for the official React Native for macOS implementation from Microsoft. Does anyone know when these changes are planning to be upstreamed?

eyelidlessness 6y ago
RN's been available for many years, and little interest has been shown in providing first class support for desktop targets. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if: 1. the recent FB messenger desktop apps are RN. 2. they leverage work done in forks (like this one from MS) to achieve that.

ARandomerDude 6y ago

> Windows > We are actively developing React Native for Windows... > Mac > Coming soon So React Native for Windows.

olyjohn 6y ago
Don't forget... Microsoft <3 Linux. You can tell it's a top consideration.
- snazz 6y ago
  They don't <3 desktop Linux and probably never will. To them, Windows and macOS are the major desktop operating systems, and Linux is the server operating system. VS Code likely only runs on Linux because Electron runs on Linux.
- cutler 6y ago
  Yeah, MS's <3 for Linux started with their patent racket aimed at Red Hat and Suse. Let's also not forget their bankrolling of SCO's anti-Linux lawsuits in the 00s. "So sharing, so caring".
ComputerGuru 6y ago
It’s literally linked to from that page, just not ready for release: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-macos

tphan 6y ago

I've used React Native for a client and, whilst it was super clunky, I still enjoyed being able to write React to deploy to mobile. With React Native for Web, you can technical write code that writes to a bunch of different platforms, a big selling point for businesses.

yesimahuman 6y ago
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.
- crazypython 6y ago
  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 https://github.com/wix/react-native-navigation is beautiful, it uses iOS' own navigation APIs, but it's a pain.
  - yesimahuman 6y ago
    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).

ShaneMcGowan 6y ago

React Native for Xbox seems like a step in the complete wrong direction...

cbhl 6y ago
Glad to see I wasn't the only one confused by the Xbox and game controller in the header. (I mean, sure, it "just" runs Windows, but...)

zapzupnz 6y ago

I'd love to see some dog-fooding on this. Maybe a branch of VS Code for RN. I mean, say what you will about the quality of even Apple's own Catalyst apps, but at least they eat their own dogfood (although with the unfortunate consequence of making us eat it, too). There are so many different competing projects at MS to do practically the same thing, it'd be great to see RN for Windows and macOS used for something major from MS.

sophiebits 6y ago
Last I heard, they are using it for at least significant parts of Office and Skype.

jonbronson 6y ago

Unfortunately, `Good First Issue` and `help wanted` sections are currently empty for the macOS fork.

AbuAssar 6y ago

The mac related lib and docs are still ComingSoonTM

jasonhansel 6y ago

Of course, no Linux support, since this is still Microsoft :(

johnghanks 6y ago
Classic HN - never anything positive to say about any story here.

djabatt 6y ago

The web site reads "Mac coming soon" the headline reads differently.

natch 6y ago

React Native is best understood as an insurgent attack on native mobile platforms, funded by overwealthy and bloated companies that do not control mobile platforms, but feel entitled. Microsoft and Facebook attacking Apple and Google basically. IMHO it's not a sincere effort to make a nice platform. It moves fast and breaks things in major ways with each minor point release, with the current excuse being that it's not at 1.0 yet. But it offers just enough to introduce FUD into the competitors' ecosystems. And that's the entire goal as far as I can tell. If you value getting useful deep knowledge, stay away. If you want to play in the shallows and be patching stuff up all the time with JavaScript/TypeScript, React Native is an option.

rosywoozlechan 6y ago
How are Facebook and Microsoft any more or less "bloated" than Google or Apple? Also Discord's iOS app is built with ReactNative, and it is a pretty feature rich application, seems like it works for those use it.
- natch 6y ago
  They have lots of money but without carrying the cost of maintaining an active hardware product line. Unless you count Oculus for Facebook and a few minor things for Microsoft but those are in the noise.

unnouinceput 6y ago

. (dot) (ignore me, I need this comment to comeback to it in the future)

iainmerrick 6y ago

I asked this on a previous React Native thread, and I’m still curious: is RN (on mobile, as that’s where it’s currently used) actually faster than something like PhoneGap? Are there any benchmarks or demos? Anyone got any anecdotes of a like-for-like comparison? I’m skeptical (though certainly willing to be convinced) because RN runs your JS application in a separate thread from the UI, with a rather expensive bridge sending JSON messages back and forth. That seems to me a poor design choice. Browsers have the downside of working with the complex DOM that doesn’t map as well to native widgets. But browsers are mature and highly optimized. So I would guess that performance might be a wash.

firloop 6y ago
Performance is just one reason companies adapt something like React Native, the ability to have web developers* come in and string native-quality components together is another. React Native can feel better than mobile web and have access to lower level APIs. * I think this is more of a selling point than a reality. I think in practice, to make a React Native feel and work well requires native platform knowledge.
KuhlMensch 6y ago
Yes its faster, for majority of cases. But if you overload the bridge, you not only hit a bottleneck, you hit an async bottleneck between your UI code and native. Very rare for that to happen in my experience, and well worth the trade-off.

m_mueller 6y ago

Why is Microsoft doing this instead of Facebook?

dep_b 6y ago

Those JavaScript cross-platform solutions are opaque boxes that run basically their own operating system within an operating system. This comes at a penalty of a non-standard UX and higher than usual CPU usage and memory usage. But after they tackled that hurdle (like Visual Studio Code, excellent work), they still lack a lot of platform standard goodies like Accessibility and AppleScript. I prefer solutions like Xamarin / Mono where you can have a Cocoa UI coupled with C# or F# based dll's. Let's be honest, as long as you have a good way of maintaining a good state in your app for example by already using ViewModels that did most of the heavy lifting like formatting strings, having the state in a state machine and so on, getting the UI to work as required is just an exercise of filling in the colors between the lines. Barely anyone would notice they were using a Xamarin based solution on a Mac, while the JS based applications are immediately really obvious to the trained eye.

techntoke 6y ago
It's almost like people want a new markup language for defining interfaces that isn't based on JavaScript.

langitbiru 6y ago

A decade ago, Java was the de-facto language to build a cross-platform desktop application (with Java Swing). Now it is JavaScript. So be it then.... Too bad Rust does not have something similar.

jbverschoor 6y ago

Only a matter of months before VSCode will not be an electron app anymore.

SZJX 6y ago

Looked at it a while ago when I was trying to start a cross-platform app (both on mobile and on desktop), but under the Mac section it simply said "Coming Soon!". I thought there's some update with this post receiving so many upvotes, but apparently it's still the same, and Mac support is still in a very early experimental stage. Flutter left me a similar impression. I eventually ended up using Quasar https://quasar.dev/ https://quasar.dev/, which allows you to use one Vue.js codebase but deploy to Cordova on mobile and Electron on desktop. Vue is definitely not the prettiest solution out there, but I had to be practical and actually get the app out. Maybe if I started the project one year in the future, the landscape would be totally different already. It's definitely changing rapidly.

chimp_brain 6y ago
I think I might be on the same boat. I have personally looked into all frameworks and planning to hire a team, quasar seems is one of the options. The application isn't for any mission-critical application, revolves around curd. Quasar is a good option albeit with a lot of baggage, Flutter is clean but for Desktop use case it's still evolving. How was your experience with Quasar? Would you recommend Flutter over Quasar?

Etheryte 6y ago

While personally I dislike React Native in the strongest terms possible for the number of nigh impossible to debug technical issues it has brought the projects that tried to tame it, there is a really interesting moment happening here. Microsoft is embracing Facebook's cross-platform tools to eventually compete with Google's cross-platform Electron. Microsoft currently relies on Google for the internals of VS Code, Github for Desktop and many more of its popular pieces of kit, and it doesn't seem very happy about it. My own experience with React Native has been nothing but terrible, but it will be interesting to see how all of this will play out in the long run.

nailer 6y ago
V8, Chromium and Blink are an Open Source projects that Google is one of the main contributors to, but they're not 'Google'. If Google went away tomorrow, V8, Chromium and Blink would still exist, and Microsoft would be able to use all projects.
- Etheryte 6y ago
  The problem isn't the projects going away, more so that Microsoft has no control over where those projects are headed. If Electron moves in a direction that works well for Google but not so well for Microsoft, they can't do much about it unless they want to pick up maintaining a full fork.
  - nailer 6y ago
    Google doesn't care about Electron, much like they don't care about node.js, despite those projects relying on tech Google contributes to. Whereas Microsoft does care about Electron.
- biggestdecision 6y ago
  Sure they are open source projects, but the majority of dev work is done on Google's dime. Google employs many of the most important people in these projects. Sure the code will still be there if Google gives up, but will anyone have the capacity to step up and maintain them?

parshua 6y ago

I wish someone would take a web renderer, took the Javascript away, made a native react-like library for it, and made a universal interface to it so any language could use it. That would finally fix the problem with the UI building issue, while allowing flexible language access. That would be the best of both worlds.

tsukurimashou 6y ago
sounds a lot like what wasm is trying to achieve (minus the web rendering part)

EastSmith 6y ago

I looked at the docs, and checked the Calculator demo app. It a Visual Studio solution. I will not install Visual Studio because each time I install it (last time it was 5 years back now), my Windows Installation gets polluted with all kinds of packages that I now never ever been able to figure out how to uninstall. I can copy couple of dlls in a project folder, and run npm / yarn install, but that is the most I am willing to do. So, my question is: is there a VS Code / npm only demo? As an ex-windows developer, turned react dev - I am excited.

Bellamy 6y ago

React Native is getting better all the time and it's mature already. I think people who criticize RN are the devs who had to work with the first few shitty versions of RN in a shitty complex project. I think that's the case in many, if not all, open source projects. We do pretty complex stuff with RN as does Facebook and it's been serving us well. I don't know why someone would want to use it with Windows, but this tells how far the project has gotten. I would love to developed native, but you just save a lot (maybe half) time using RN if you need the app for both platforms.

OzzyB 6y ago

> React Native for Windows and Mac > Mac: Coming Soon You know what, I think I'll wait for Flutter Desktop, or see who wins true cross-desktop compatibilty since Flutter already has Mac support but no Windows.

mister_hn 6y ago

Where's the Linux one?