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Comment by jd20 | Hacker News Reader

Well, someone probably said the same about Go or React-Native when they first came out too. We have to start somewhere...

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> Well, someone probably said the same about Go or React-Native when they first came out too

RN came from a giant company that uses it in its core product. Big difference.

As did Go - Google is as equally giant as Facebook and uses Go in it core products.

cf https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

(Agree with parent but not wanting Go to be left out of the "giant company" bucket.)

That's not really a direct comparison. We're not talking about languages here - it's the framework. React Native is used and developed by Facebook, whereas Matcha is used and developed by no one notable (afaik).

You're comparing Go to RN. The comparison he's making is Matcha to RN. Matcha doesn't come from a giant company. The language it's in does, but that doesn't mean anything for framework momentum.

We are discussing about the framework itself and not go as a language.

The framework is a nice idea, and will definitely help into diversifying some of the mobile frontend stuff.

On the other hand you can't compare RN to this framework.

As the person you commented on, facebook has been using RN on its main products like instagram, so it has proven that the framework can be placed on production ready apps with a massive userbase.

Use to be that if there was a nice open source project that solved most of a problem you had, you'd jump on, if you had the ability, and contribute back to it. Now I guess we just wait for random handouts from big companies so we don't have to do any work ourselves. Bit of a shame, the appification of open source, but I guess that's where it's going. Big and supported, with no room for newcomers. I wonder how this is much different than what people say about net neutrality? Once the big guys are there, they'll actively do what they can to kick the latter down so no upstarts can chase them up it, and I guess this is just as true of the web. Hope we can find a big company to release us an open source web replacement one of these decades, since I guess we won't be able to band together and build it for ourselves.

> Now I guess we just wait for random handouts from big companies so we don't have to do any work ourselves.

Yeah the kids nowadays are terrible.

Large codebases have never been particularly welcoming to newcomers.

I see it as a sign of maturity. People now realize it's completely unreasonable to think about debugging or maintaining some codebase as a hobby themselves (aka: in addition to the product they're building). For a cross-platform dev framework on mobile, knowing the pace at which those platforms are moving, you need something that has both the team , the fund and the stakes.

We grew up and realised that only open source from big companies actually pays the bills.

Painful but honest at least.

So did Three20

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