1/ I’m seeing a lot of hemming, hawing, and gnashing of teeth over AirBnB’s announcement that they are sunsetting React Native. They are unrolling a pretty massive investment. Obviously this is a setback for React Native ecosystem.
2/ However look at the State of the React Native 2018 post by @sophiebits. It announces a *huge* shift in React Native that, if in place during AirBnB, I believe would have addressed or potentially addressed nearly all of their issues
3/ High level takeaway @sophiebits' post: “We're working on a large-scale re-architecture of React Native to make the framework more flexible and integrate better with native infrastructure in hybrid JavaScript/native apps.”
4/ Dig into the tech details post from @gpeal8.
medium.com/airbnb-enginee… The new change addresses a ton of their issues. A sampling:
medium.com/airbnb-enginee… The new change addresses a ton of their issues. A sampling:
5/ From @gpeal8: re "Long Lists" Many of the limitations are difficult to overcome because of the threading. Adapter data can’t be accessed synchronously so it is possible to see views flash in as they get asynchronously rendered while scrolling quickly."
6/ From @sophiebits "it will be possible to call synchronously into JavaScript on any thread for high-priority updates while still keeping low-priority work off the main thread to maintain responsiveness"
7/ From @gpeal8 "React Native has a bridge API to communicate between native and React Native. While it works as expected, it is extremely cumbersome to write."
8/ From @sophiebits "Finally, we are simplifying our bridge to make it faster and more lightweight; direct calls between native and JavaScript are more efficient and will make it easier to build debugging tools like cross-language stack traces."
9/ And so on and so forth. Some of the other issues will still be there. (Aside: A few of the other issues were lack of using TypeScript or Flow. tbh I'm not close enough to the ground on that to understand why that was difficult.)
10/ But so many of the other issues will be solved with an ecosystem that builds in more of the native capabilities (accessibility, gestures, crash monitoring are mentioned) that can fall under the rubric of "Parallel Infrastructure" mentioned in the post.
11/ This isn't a criticism of @gpeal8. It sounds like they made the right choice given what they were facing and the state of RN at this moment in time. But the direction of @reactnative is exactly what it needs to be in order address these issues.
12/ I think that this new direction of an RN built from the ground up for native integration is a huge step forward and will make the next AirBnB-scale RN project much more successful.
13/ And as a final note I'm no longer at Facebook and don't have much insider information about these issues today. But as an outsider it's exciting to watch.
