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Comment by sjroot | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to hear more about how this differentiates from existing alternatives, namely Proton Native[1] and the NodeJS bindings to libui[2]. I am specifically interested to see how/if/when Microsoft will support Linux and macOS, as the aforementioned solutions already do.

[1] https://proton-native.js.org/#/

[2] https://github.com/parro-it/libui-node

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Yes, it will be cross platform, it's all part of the move of Office to React, see this whole Twitter thread [0] from Sean Larkin:

> And here's ReactXP which is baked in to Skype (consumer) to make it possible to ship cross plat and single code base native applications with consistent UI

[0]: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006857447364063232

I don't see anything about moving office to react there.

The developer who started that twitter thread massively overstated how much react was going to be used in MS Office applications because for some reason he didn't like that a college professor said that scripting languages aren't appropriate for developing an office suite. You can see in the first tweet he says that all of the office applications are being re-written in javascript, and after everyone was thoroughly dissapointed that MS would do that, other developers from MS commented here and on reddit that all of the office tools were going to stay written in C++, and react was only going to be used for some of the UI design, there was never a plan to rewrite everything in react.

To be fair, he never said Office (the good old Office "client"), he said Office 365, which is the web app version of Office basically.

Everyone knows Office is C/C++. Ported to iOS and Android thanks to that.

Officially Office 365 includes the subscription version of the native client apps. The web apps are called Office Online. Lots of people are confused about this though, as it's confusing.

Office 365 is the subscription service that includes both the evergreen versions of the native Office apps and Office Online.

It's at the top of the thread [0]:

> All of Office 365 is (almost finished) being completely rewritten in this little scripting language called #JavaScript.

[0]: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006746626617008128

Yeah so Office != Office 365.

"We have multiple forks of react-native for each platform. Of course combined with ReactXP and friends. :)"

https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006762319790125057

It's not clear to me that maintaining multiple forks of react native per environment is so much easier. And that still doesn't buy you native performance & controls. I don't really get it to be honest.

Looks more like an alternative to React Native for Web[1] and React Native Windows[2].

[1] https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows

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