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Comment by owaislone | Hacker News Reader

This has got nothing to do with browsers. This is just a set of APIs that allows developers to use ReactJS (not web, just javascript) to write Ubuntu apps. I didn't read the ReadMe in detail but judging from React Native for Android, iOS, Windows and OS X, this will use QT UI toolkit under the hood, not web tech.

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This has everything to do with browsers. What React Native does comes very close to what a browser is doing. React is just a very thin layer on top of JS/HTML that makes the browser a little more efficient and pleasant to program for (they are not the only ones by the way, there are many virtual dom implementations). But that layer is getting thicker and thicker. You can say "react native" and "browser" are different things, but they really aren't. Both are application delivery platforms.

My problems with React:

- They try to push a programming paradigm, without considering that other programmers may have different or even better paradigms.

- They put too much functionality into a single framework.

- Frameworks are a bad idea anyway. It is much better to divide functionality into self-contained libraries.

- They try to redo what the web, a huge standardization effort, is doing.

- React does not fully support all HTML/CSS constructs.

Now all of this isn't really a problem right now. But if React grows and gains more traction, then it could become a problem (just like Internet Explorer became a problem after a while).

Have you ever used React Native, or read anything about it for that matter?

It's just JavaScript wrappers for native UI toolkits. Much in the same way there are Python wrappers, Ruby wrappers etc. The only difference between React Native and someone else's JS bindings is that React Native makes use of a virtual view hierarchy and several other React-isms - which have absolutely nothing to do with the web except in-so-far as that they were first implemented on the web.

Yes, React Native supports an API based on the web's Flexbox API, and view styling similar to CSS - but these are applied to native views. React Native doesn't implement any rendering of its own. However, if anything this is bringing web technologies to native development, they're in no way conflicting with browsers - React Native has nothing to do with a web browser.

As I said, React Native provides bindings for native UI development. Now, whether or not you think that's a good idea is up to you. Swift and Cocoa are generally pretty good, so I can see why iOS devs might steer clear. However, the Android SDK is a complete joke, React Native is significantly more efficient to develop with.

> However, the Android SDK is a complete joke, React Native is significantly more efficient to develop with.

Are there any other reasons for choosing one over the other? Are they similar in terms of what you can do/the performance? With libraries like phonegap/cordova, you have to sacrifice some APIs and the resulting app may be more sluggish. I was wondering if it's the case with React Native.

I have no experience with phonegap/Cordova. But to the first part of your question, please see my answer below/ or above. to another comment.

> They try to push a programming paradigm, without considering that other programmers may have different or even better paradigms.

React and React Native are framework/libraries/whatever made by Facebook to solve Facebook engineering problems (they're cool in the way they unashamedly only open source what they actually use).

They have their own paradigms they prefer and it works well for them and many others. Why should Facebook cater to every programmer's favorite paradigm?. You could honestly say the same thing about most frameworks—do people complain Rails makes it hard to do functional programming?

> React is just a very thin layer on top of JS/HTML

React is in no way a layer over Javascript. React is just an API to write UIs with pluggable backends. The backend can be HTML, HTML Canvas, iOS UIKit, Android widget toolkit, Winforms, GTK, QT, etc etc. It's just a higher level API for writing UIs in Javascript. It's not a platform for application delivery. Browsers and application run times + stores on iOS/Android/Ubuntu are are platforms for application delivery.

React is not even a framework. It's just a library which you can include in your bigger framework.

> - They try to push a programming paradigm, without considering that other programmers may have different or even better paradigms.

Programmers who don't like how React works can use something else. There are lots of choices out there. Angular2, om, cyclejs, mithril, ember, backbone are some of the choices. You make it sounds as if React is a browser with a limited set of APIs.

I'm not saying React is perfect but the arguments you make are totally invalid IMO.

> React is in no way a layer over Javascript.

I was thinking about JSX here. It is translated to Javascript, so a layer, imho.

Layers are not a bad thing. What is bad is that React tries to lump together many layers into a single framework.

JSX is syntactic sugar for JavaScript.

Not clear what you are referring to by the "many layers" or indeed the "framework".

Well you can write pure JS instead of JSX if that helps. An example: https://github.com/ustun/react-without-jsx/blob/master/child...

Thanks. That actually looks better to me than JSX, and I would like to avoid transpiling JS in a pure web app.

(disclosure: I've been an Angular 1 dev for a bit over a year and only skimmed some React material, but I have also done other stuff for the last 30 years)

It might look more familiar, but it's not better than JSX. It gets really tedious to write the pure JavaScript versions of components especially when specifying lots of attributes and nested components. It's also hard to follow. Everyone I've worked with on React projects has had similar initial reactions, it just looks weird to have html inside JS. But try it out first, I'm sure you'll grow accustomed to writing JSX and the tooling built around it.

I disagree. I'm working on a large react project now and am not using JSX. I find JSX to be very ugly with all their closing div tags.

Check out this project to see how people use React without JSX:

https://github.com/jador/react-hyperscript-helpers

React is not a framework. According to it's home page, it's: A JAVASCRIPT LIBRARY FOR BUILDING USER INTERFACES.

React Native might look a web-based kind of toolkit but it's not. It supports a HTMLish layout system based on Flexbox, but it's its own native compositing and layout framework. It circumvents the HTML layouting middle layer and a browser layer. It doesn't need any virtual DOM, for example.

While it might sound redundant, it's more about making UI layout simpler, faster, and all in all more "native".

There's already plenty of browser view-based layout frameworks, and in general they run into the same limitations (performance, lack of native components, etc). This is an alternative solution to that. Think of it as a middle ground between Xamarin and Phonegap.

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