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I am not a front end developer, but when reading about these kinds of switches in front end frameworks... isn't that an incredible amount of work? How could it

I am not a front end developer, but when reading about these kinds of switches in front end frameworks... isn't that an incredible amount of work? How could it be justified? It must have created some really serious unsolvable problems in order to switch right? You would think it would be easier to improve the existing one instead of switching, but who knows. Either that or the amount of front end code really isn't as much as I imagine.

frank_nitti 4y ago
Probably not “unsolvable” but I imagine not well documented and a million footguns to make RN work in the scenarios described in the article. This would entail working in a new fork of React Native to add implementations for the underlying Android and iOS SDKs where the native functionality exists. That might include language bindings at multiple levels, e.g. from JS to Java, and potentially Java to C if NDK is required (and that’s just for android) In my experience, writing those bindings is very bug-prone and user-friendly documentation can be hard to come by. We wrote some Python extensions in C for a very simple functionality where we wanted native speed. Could definitely see it having been easier to just write the dang program in C, since you had to understand C as well as some fundamentals about how the Python runtime works in C along with its special data types and execution patterns. And if they mainly hire app developers and not interpreter/OS developers that could become entirely untenable
galaxyLogic 4y ago
The front-end should be just the (user-) interface. The main logic is best kept on the server. In the early days of the web there was such a thing as "text-based browser". (Don't recall its name right now). You could interface with the WWW via a text-console. The point was user-interface shouldn't be the main thing of the application, it should be just a shell around it.

frank_nitti 4y ago

Probably not “unsolvable” but I imagine not well documented and a million footguns to make RN work in the scenarios described in the article. This would entail working in a new fork of React Native to add implementations for the underlying Android and iOS SDKs where the native functionality exists. That might include language bindings at multiple levels, e.g. from JS to Java, and potentially Java to C if NDK is required (and that’s just for android) In my experience, writing those bindings is very bug-prone and user-friendly documentation can be hard to come by. We wrote some Python extensions in C for a very simple functionality where we wanted native speed. Could definitely see it having been easier to just write the dang program in C, since you had to understand C as well as some fundamentals about how the Python runtime works in C along with its special data types and execution patterns. And if they mainly hire app developers and not interpreter/OS developers that could become entirely untenable

galaxyLogic 4y ago

The front-end should be just the (user-) interface. The main logic is best kept on the server. In the early days of the web there was such a thing as "text-based browser". (Don't recall its name right now). You could interface with the WWW via a text-console. The point was user-interface shouldn't be the main thing of the application, it should be just a shell around it.