[thewhitetulip]

I am curious of the use of React to build desktop apps. Can anyone give me an overview?

[alfonsodev]

Have a look to Electron http://electron.atom.io/ it provides the APIs to the host OS, then about the React part maybe using one of the popular boilerplates https://github.com/chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate

[thewhitetulip]

I am sorry, I meant to ask if React is as fast as writing applications in other langs like C/Java/Python/Go.

I hear that JS is slow, plus I use a lot of apps based on electron and they are a bit slow, VSCode is a remarkable exception to that norm.

[scarlac]

React Native uses native OS components, meaning they'll render fast. But if you want to do heavy computing you may get frame drops. Some bundled components are partially native and partially custom, so you'll still need to be mindful of how you work with them.

There's a section in the React Native documentation dedicated to explaining this and I think it does a good job of it: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/performance.htm...

In my opinion, for many use cases you'll be able to write an app that really feels native an performs very well. If you need more performance or other custom stuff you are also able to integrate your own native components (e.g. Swift/Objective-C, etc.) into React Native.

[thewhitetulip]

Thank you!