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Comment by mostafaberg | Hacker News Reader

It's a great piece of tech, I'm not saying anything against that, I'm saying that it shouldn't be used as a replacement for native programming because you don't want to learn a new language. react will come with huge limitations and deps that you don't want to even think about, it's never easy as "code once, deploy everywhere", this is usually a bad decision any company makes, engineering wise.. same reason as adobe air never took off, it's a bad idea, the only reason this is taking off is because people already know JS and don't want to learn something else.

By the "right way" I mean use every language for its intended purpose, you can't build desktop apps in browsers, that's why we have Javascript. and i'm saying we should keep it that way

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React Native doesn't claim "code once, deploy everywhere", and in fact embraces native APIs where appropriate. As a reference, their slogan is "learn once, write anywhere". In other words, learn React Native, and write native apps wherever you want. Indeed one of the opening talks about React Native at React Conf specifically mentions that React Native is a leaky abstraction, and embraces that by allowing multiple escape hatches so that the native APIs are always available.

Railing against React Native seems like railing against Unity3d, or saying that abstracting the common parts of mobile development (while leaving the non-common parts 100% available) is a bad thing.

By the "right way" I mean use every language for its intended purpose, you can't build desktop apps in browsers

You can build desktop apps in browsers (ie emscripten). Additionally, can you explain why a "language" (as compared to platform specific APIs) has any relevance to what can or can't be built for a mobile device? For JavaScript specifically, if Apple didn't think that it was a language for building applications on iOS, then why would they ever have release JavascriptCore (which is what React Native uses)?

React is native. It's a JS interpreter on a separate queue rendering native UILabels and UIViews. I'd say the concept is far more superior to UIKit which disgusts me, and I've worked with for almost seven years now. I honestly think React is the future, but for now we can try to stick with MVVM and RxSwift ;-).

I think you're fundamentally not understanding how React (not just React-native) works.

This is mainly taking off because native developers want a fast build-run loop, hot code reloading, the ability to update code on the device without pushing a new App Store release, and a shared technology and mental model for writing apps across web, iOS and Android.

This is happening.

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