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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

If the React team was impacted, I imagine, given half of the core React team is already there, Vercel would scoop up the rest of the talent if they were interested in working at Vercel.

I don't think React is going anywhere given its bigger than Meta now.

That said, React Native seems like its the development framework for all Meta applications, I imagine its still core to their business as a result, but that may have changed, I am a few years out of date on this exactly

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RN's not really core to Meta tbh. The most important surfaces are all built either natively or with NT / Blocks I think. Also ~19 months outdated though.

I interviewed at Meta more recently than that, and the engineers I spoke with mentioned the same thing.

What's "NT / Blocks"?

Sorry about that, should've clarified!

NT - Native Templates. It's a cross-platform app dev framework where you can write Hack on the server once to make surfaces for both iOS and Android.

Blocks is similar to NT but in Python (IG backend is all Python)

Ah, got it, thank you!

How does it work. In the sense that what does it provide the client side. Does the client get served pre-rendered interfaces of some sort?

Trying to figure it out as the Meta apps are very nice UX wise and maybe web technologies have come a long way to "feel native" hence i am in disbelief at the leaps and bounds being made.

Not super sure about how the internals work but iirc this is the flow:

- Eng writes Hack/Python code on backend with a view tag-ish

- Client has native components for NT and Blocks. The native component references tag-ish from above and pulls code / config

- The code / config returned from the backend gets translated into Litho/ComponentKit components (so native Android UI elements) and rendered

what is `tag-ish`? Having trouble googling it

Interesting! Thanks for the explanation!

Interesting, does it cross compile a hack based DSL to iOS and android?

Curious to hear more!

Think full-featured bootstrap components. Design + FE build "Bloks", product teams use them everywhere.

Do you work at Meta? This tweet from 2020 seems to imply it is used pretty extensively: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1234801516843819009

I was at Meta when this was tweeted and I think he must be referring to mostly internal apps. AFAIK the only part of the FB app that was heavily React Native was FB Marketplace.

By 2021 there were edicts in some departments that absolutely no new projects were to written with RN, with the emphasis moving towards their server-side rendering frameworks (Native Templates and Bloks.)

Wonder if that means React Native will either get turned over to a foundation or will be de-prioritized / ended as a project

What do NT and Block mean in this context?

source? "tbh" and "I think" is cool and all, however I could also just throw out things I believe

Would be nice to know where you get your information from, that RN isn't core to Meta

Former long-time mobile eng at Meta here: RN is considered by most internally to be hot garbage and very unpleasant to work with.

They have 2 or 3 other React-like internal frameworks that most of the apps are made with. ComponentKit is the main one for the Blue App, and IIRC that's open source.

Indeed it is[0]

[0]: https://componentkit.org/

I don't know if Expo has any core React Native team members yet, but they might be able to hire any of those if needed.

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