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Yeah my one time getting into react native was not good. Ran into several show stopping bugs with the build tooling basically immediately. Hot reload is absolut

Yeah my one time getting into react native was not good. Ran into several show stopping bugs with the build tooling basically immediately. Hot reload is absolutely a killer feature though and I wish I could have stuck with it for that alone. My issue with JS isn't the fact that its on/off the main thread, its that it is _necessarily async_ due to the bridge. That is _really_ limiting to design around. Thats why Xamarin is in many ways the best of both worlds for mobile dev. If WASM/client-side-blazor take off then it can also target web.

nwienert 6y ago
Actually curious how it’s limiting being async? I’m doing some intense animations and interaction so far with no trouble.
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  Are you doing the heavy lifting on the native side? I haven't used react native for a while so I don't know the facilities it offers, but my understanding was navigation/animation were not really solved yet. I would also be curious about what devices you are validating the interactions on. Is it a wide range, or mostly newer models? For async issues, the canonical example I can think of is state restoration for when an app/activity is reaped by the system. These are synchronous platform APIs and so your options are very limited on how you plan to support them. Another example would be doing any sort of IO/background processing in the JS context that happens to return during interaction/animation that is also in the JS context.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    Ah yea I haven't run into the state restoration thing. Fabric[0] is fairly exciting though, and seems like it will have a sync API. I think they've improved quite a bit on animations, the Animated library has worked well for me with PanResponder, I was able to get a pretty complex bottom drawer interaction working (much like Apple Maps) where you need to handle bubbling events with multiple nested scrollable areas and dragging that inits only when scrolled to top, etc, all came together very smoothly. In SwiftUI it was a similar API, but far more work to get to behave and in the end I was doing some hacky stuff to get it finally fully behaving. Granted, SwiftUI is early stage, so perhaps in a year or so it will also have figured all this out. As for testing, we've tested on a $100 two year old Android device with success, but nothing truly old. [0] https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/4 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr...

nwienert 6y ago

Actually curious how it’s limiting being async? I’m doing some intense animations and interaction so far with no trouble.

JamesSwift 6y ago
Are you doing the heavy lifting on the native side? I haven't used react native for a while so I don't know the facilities it offers, but my understanding was navigation/animation were not really solved yet. I would also be curious about what devices you are validating the interactions on. Is it a wide range, or mostly newer models? For async issues, the canonical example I can think of is state restoration for when an app/activity is reaped by the system. These are synchronous platform APIs and so your options are very limited on how you plan to support them. Another example would be doing any sort of IO/background processing in the JS context that happens to return during interaction/animation that is also in the JS context.
- nwienert 6y ago
  Ah yea I haven't run into the state restoration thing. Fabric[0] is fairly exciting though, and seems like it will have a sync API. I think they've improved quite a bit on animations, the Animated library has worked well for me with PanResponder, I was able to get a pretty complex bottom drawer interaction working (much like Apple Maps) where you need to handle bubbling events with multiple nested scrollable areas and dragging that inits only when scrolled to top, etc, all came together very smoothly. In SwiftUI it was a similar API, but far more work to get to behave and in the end I was doing some hacky stuff to get it finally fully behaving. Granted, SwiftUI is early stage, so perhaps in a year or so it will also have figured all this out. As for testing, we've tested on a $100 two year old Android device with success, but nothing truly old. [0] https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/4 https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr...