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Comment by fabiospampinato | Hacker News Reader

I've been pretty excited about the possibility of using Flutter in the future potentially, once it gets good, that issue got my hopes down a lot. You know a project is not in good hands when they say spending 6~10% of the CPU for rendering a blinking cursor is justified.

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I was excited about using Flutter "when it got good" almost 2 years ago now. At this point I just go for React Native if I need an app for mobile and web, and React if I just need a web app.

That's a practical solution, but IMO React is playing a fundamentally different game here, they have Native for mobile apps, and third-party (!) support for Windows and Mac (what about Linux?). Native doesn't even support the web, like React and React Native are two different things, they just share a somewhat similar UI framework basically.

Flutter on the other hand is architected as a solve-it-all solution. They even went as far as designing Dart rather than hacking a decent solution on top of JS and the current mess of web standards. IMO that's a much more interesting and powerful approach, that isn't fully ready yet, but if it ever becomes actually good I'll personally probably jump ship and use it for everything.

React Native Web exists [0]. But I agree, having parts be third party doesn't mesh well with being a complete framework for building apps (on whatever platform you need).

[0] https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web

It exists, but it's a third-party thing, the value proposition here is not the same, Flutter plans to address to entire problem itself, React Native is only concerned with mobile basically, for everything else you are at the mercy of a third-party, which among other things may just stop maintaining the very platform you depend on, how can one build anything serious on top of that?

Yep agreed. I tried to once wrangle together all the React frameworks to make something like what flutter offers, but in the end I gave up and used Flutter just because of how easy it makes it to run everything cross platform. Since the RN versions for desktop are third party, I didn't have much confidence in them being supported well, as you said.

The Facebook team has alluded a number of times about making some of the “third party” platforms become first class members of react native. They haven’t officially announced anything but I’m guessing Microsoft’s work on react native for Windows/macOS will be folded into the main repo at some point in the near future. Facebook (seemingly based on git commits) has a number of full time employees collaborating with Microsoft on the Windows and macOS ports. Facebook messenger for desktop is already built with it.

I haven’t seen any type of movement on react native web becoming something official, but it works amazingly well at the moment and is in use in production at Twitter.

We just need a Linux port and the react native ecosystem will be pretty complete.

Last I checked Facebook Messenger has yet to use RNW: https://twitter.com/Eli_White/status/1422790525694844928?s=2...

RNW actually has about three teeny tiny customers that no one has heard of except for the Microsoft Store on Xbox. So much for Microsoft's "Universal" Windows Platform! Lmao

Hard to say from that tweet what they mean. I found two blog posts from the React Native team that mention RN on Desktop and Messenger. Both are similarly vague if this is some internal test happening or if the actual production app is using it. https://reactnative.dev/blog/2021/08/26/many-platform-vision and https://reactnative.dev/blog/2021/08/19/h2-2021

I've seen the same posts you have linked and can only conclude that they've currently been using either React Native for Web or are using a React website in an Electron app, and are planning on releasing a RNW app. The current app could perhaps be using RNW but targeting win32.

But note that someone from Microsoft linked that tweet in response to a question of who uses RNW: https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/6050#i...

There's some suspiciously React Native macOS looking components in Messenger for macOS (native macOS text boxes, native macOS blurred backgrounds, etc). I'm thinking this is either fully React Native, or they have some sort of RN/Electron hybrid going on (which is a thing, apparently).

yeah idk about the macos app personally but i can say that the windows app is definitely electron. at least last time i checked.

by 'react native' i'm guessing you're referring to RNW, although a port of their iOS app is possible Facebook had previously just used a port of their iOS for their Windows app too.

I think we need a new acronym. RND (React Native Desktop)? Microsoft is doing React Native for macOS alongside of React Native Windows. The macOS port is a little bit behind the Windows one, but actively being worked on by Microsoft and Facebook employees, afaik.

Twitter web is done with React Native.

It's been 10 years

And that’s the biggest issue that Flutter has IMO. They first launched the mobile platforms, which where in decent shape, then they came out with Flutter Web, which the last time I checked is still not in any place where it is actually usable, then instead of fixing it they just started adding desktop support.

Like man just calm down and stabilize for a moment, it’s not an arms race.

In my mind Flutter isn’t native to any platform rather than all of them, so I like React Native much more these days.

What about Xamarin? Is it a viable choice for the same thing?

I've never seen a Xamarin app running on the browser, is that a thing? As far as I'm concerned the web is the most important platform I care about, if a framework doesn't support it at all, like perhaps the language used isn't even compatible with the browser, then I'm not personally interested in it.

I think that's why a lot of people are hoping for strong Blazor/MAUI alignment. I wish I liked Blazor better myself but I don't, it reminds me too much of the bad parts of ASP Classic wearing the skin of ASP.NET. Seeing the turduckens some of the hopeful are building of Blazor Razor Pages hosted in MAUI are interesting for sure, but partly in that way that I'm expecting a horror jump scare to follow.

(ETA: Sorry, that sounds way harsher than I intended. Waiting for coffee to kick in.)

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