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I am pretty confused as to what this actually does. How can it be native?

My guess is we're missing an important piece of the puzzle. Unless they have a js to everything interpreter. In which case thats much bigger news than react.

Its more of a shiv to convert react elements/calls into native UI elements, using a native server to receive streams/messages (unsure which) and convert them.

Instead of having React render to the DOM it renders to Native views. Be it iOS, or Android.

I doubt it would happen at runtime in iOS/Android, though? They would need to ship a JS interpreter that gets run on application startup, parse the React files, instantiate the native controls and create a bridge between them back to the JS interpreter?

Well on second thought I guess Appcelerator Titanium does something similar. So it's native UI only, but with the added overhead (JS interpreter + bridge, larger binary size, slower startup, etc.).

Depends. There could be a build step that compiles all that logic. Or there could indeed by a JS runtime.

>They would need to ship a JS interpreter that gets run on application startup

Um, why? They already have JavaScriptCore (it's an iOS API).

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