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Comment by sam-mueller | Hacker News Reader

I like the steady stream of innovative projects coming out of facebook as of late, but I can't help but feel like there's quite a bit of overlap in their initiatives. Just the fact that there's a footnote about how this isn't react-native illustrates my sentiments exactly.

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You're right that there's some overlap:

> It may surprise you to hear that the Components library I’m describing is not React Native, but a separate project.

> Why the distinction? It’s simple: React Native hadn’t been invented yet when we rebuilt News Feed in Components. Everyone at Facebook is excited about the future of React Native, and it’s already been used to power both Mobile Ads Manager and Groups.

> (from http://www.objc.io/issue-22/facebook.html)

(I work on React.) We're going full steam ahead on React Native, but this is a slightly more mature project and we figured it made sense to release it for people who (for whatever reason) can't or aren't ready to adopt React Native yet. ComponentKit is also more mature and powers the most important part of the Facebook iOS app so it's virtually guaranteed to be rock-solid, whereas React Native has only been used in production for a few months.

Would be great to note this somewhere on the component kit site.

Will do shortly.

Any word on when React Native is being released? :)

:) I think our current story is "by June 10".

https://twitter.com/Vjeux/status/578311560583520256

Any clue regarding Relay and Graph-QL?

Not sure, sorry.

Any way to get early access for a huge React fan?

Early access? It's already public! https://github.com/facebook/componentkit

It was a question about React Native.

It's already public! https://github.com/facebook/react-native

it is natural and a good company strategy. Let several teams to produce competing designs that solve a similar problem with different tradeoffs. Eventually one will win inside the company.

For example Google has many many competing data backend projects build on top of Big Table, emphasing different requirements.

And they can also branch out instead of wondering 'what if we didn't make React Native rely on JavaScript and instead just used Objective-C?'. Both approaches will have differing strengths and weaknesses and both teams (and hopefully future teams of new projects elsewhere) will have more knowledge and experience to learn from.

I think it’s quite amazing what Facebook/Instagram are doing. They are creating a legacy that will hopefully inform what Apple and Google do with their frameworks too.

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