[twreactistricky]

Is there a 1,000 ft overview of React Native with a brief description of how it works, its capabilities and its limitations out there?

There's so much hype surrounding this framework, but also a lot of criticism and its extremely difficult as an inexperienced outsider to quickly determine whether or not React Native is suitable for a given project.

When I look at another cross platform framework like Qt, I can usually get a better idea of what it can do. But with React Native, its way harder to get that big picture because it seems like it wraps some native components but not all of them, etc.

Everything I read about React, especially from Facebook just seems like a puff piece. Because I know there are Facebook devs browsing this: please consider writing a proper summary.

[rymohr]

Are you familiar with the benefits of React in general?

[twreactistricky]

No, I'm not a web developer. I've tried reading some React articles. There are lots of points that are brought up again and again (diffing for minimal incremental updates, unidirectional flow, etc) that I find really hard to care about since I've never encountered them in the kind of native development I do.

[rymohr]

Just because you aren't a web developer doesn't mean you can't dabble in web development. Take 30 mins to play with their starter kit [1] or just play around inside JSFiddle [2]. Now imagine being able to encapsulate your native components the same way.

IMO encouraging you to isolate state management is the biggest win. JSX and component-based abstraction are really fucking powerful too though.

[1]: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/getting-started.html

[2]: https://jsfiddle.net/reactjs/69z2wepo/

[formula1]

I believe the greatest benefit of react is that its javascript, html and a familiar framework. Outside of that, the diffing is only "good" now is because drawing is the bottleneck. Arguably, it may be possible to have a faster framework that doesnt need to iterate over every item in a list to check for item changes.

If you have junior devs, having them learn one framework would likely be far easier than different ones for different environments. Personally, I really enjoy thinking in react. Its opened my eyes up to opportunities, relation and application to Oop in general.