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Comment by mafellows | Hacker News Reader

As a native mobile developer... How is react-native (or something similar) not the future?

From everything I can tell as well as talking to many people in the industry, React Native (or something very much like it) is definitely the future.

I still live in fear of the day some time down the road when all the people far smarter than me start writing articles titled "Why Function/Reactive/Reactifluxidux architecture was a horrible decision". That's the nature of tech I suppose.

It is always a horrible decision and often driven by an incompetent management not to go native. If I'd ask my aces to use react, I am pretty sure at least one would puke over the desk, another one would jump out of the fifth floor and the rest would simply decline and start question my competencies. (I know you'd puke Felix!)

On the other hand we're earning a lot due to all the unnecessary and wasted resources we have to sell to meet performance expectations of our customers ( and those guys happily buy it ) you could reach with 1/1000 probably 1/100000 of the MIPs by utilizing native C.

Utilizing react is not even programming or engineering. That's assembling. rant off

you're going to get downvoted and you'll think it's because you badmouthed a popular technology. It's not because of that, it's because you criticized something on a technical forum without giving any concrete reasons why said technology is bad.

From what you've seen, what's recommended, flux or redux or relay/graphql? I have trouble keeping up with those

Does it still only support OS X for building apps?

Well, we can't know the future, but I'd like to draw a parallel. A few years ago, Java offered the promise "write once, run anywhere". It worked pretty well until a major OS decided "nah, not gonna happen here".

What's different this time?

It is popular (Java was and still is), it is backed by a big company (Java too), it only needs Javascript, which all devices have (Java only needs a JVM, which all devices used to have).

Well, I sure hope for all the folks involved it really is the future. At least, it may well be for the next few years.

> It worked pretty well until a major OS decided "nah, not gonna happen here".

No, it really didn't. For a time after "Java Web Start" was introduced in 2001, java had (has) a pretty decent story for distributing application (big run time dependency, problematic java updater non withstanding).

But I think the biggest problem java had/has is the mix of java being a hopelessly verbose, and arguably rather primitive language that's a bad fit for both AWT and (to a lesser degree) Swing. It's almost comical to contrast "hello world" with swing/java and with swing/jython (or jruby) - it's not that the UI toolkit is unusable, but it's not a good fit for the biggest use-case: simple business applications.

I should add that I think kotlin looks like a pretty perfect match for "the good parts of java without any added complexity".

> What's different this time?

Modern JS is arguably a better fit for simple GUI programming than modern java is.

Just like on the desktop, true native apps will always have their place on mobile. But for a very large majority of apps React Native will be more than good enough and much faster to work with.

Personally I've switched my focus from native iOS to React & React Native.

I don't think I could deal with losing Swift's type system and working in JavaScript, plus the whole Optional vs null issue.

I can't say I don't miss types, but if you use ESLint and FlowType it's not as bad as you might think. Hopefully I'll be able to start using Typescript on React projects soon.

It totally sounds like the future, but I can't help but hate the fact that it is tied to javascript. React-native with WASM would be a dream come true :)

Many language compile to JS nowadays! (PureScript, ClojureScript and GHCJS are a few I personally would really like to use)

I think currently there are more languages compiling to JS then to JVM. :)

I personally use scala.js and clojurescript quite a bit, but in every case of an existing non-JS language compiling to JS, there is a semantic mismatch coming from the runtime mismatch. This results from various things like the lack of static types, threads, 64 bit integers, etc. Furthermore, the performance still leaves a lot to be desired.

WASM holds a lot more promise for all of these problems.

Yeah but just because you can...

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