[blakeross]

I know lots of platforms-of-the-month come through HN, and it's hard to filter the signal from the noise...just wanted to add another voice that Exponent is indeed awesome. Built by one of the sharpest (and most humble) teams in the valley.

[jameside]

Thanks Blake, that means a lot coming from you =)

[doozy]

I suggest NativeScript as an alternative that's very similar in scope but far more mature, definitely not a platform-of-the-month. The latest version is built on top of TypeScript and Angular 2 instead of React Native like Exponent.

I wonder why we don't hear that much about them in HN.

https://www.nativescript.org/

[jameside]

A more apt comparison might be React Native and NativeScript--both are frameworks that bridge native APIs to JavaScript. In contrast, Exponent is a mobile environment of which React Native is one piece.

Before choosing React Native, we deeply investigated bridging native and JavaScript on our own and one of the ways was a NativeScript-like approach. When React Native was announced we looked at the beta and saw that it exhibited many characteristics we believe are important in a next-gen app framework.

We saw that React Native was designed for multicore phones by dividing work across multiple threads, namely application logic (JS), view and text layout (this is significant), and rendering. Other work like image decoding also runs on a separate thread. One reason React Native's multithreading is fantastic is because hardware manufacturers are adding more cores faster than they are improving the performance of those cores, partly because power consumption grows superlinearly with respect to frequency. The React team is also in the early stages of exploring incremental rendering, which may allow us to parallelize React rendering in JS as well as native.

So far we're happy we chose React Native for Exponent. There's a lot of interest and activity around it and it's on the right track in several ways.

[jesseruder]

> I suggest NativeScript as an alternative that's very similar in scope but far more mature

NativeScript has been around longer than React Native (at least for Android), but going by Github activity (not the greatest metric, but not aware of a better one) React Native[1] is much more active than NativeScript[2].

Some differences between Exponent and NativeScript:

- Exponent supports building iOS and Android apps on macOS, Windows, and Linux. With NativeScript you need a Mac to build iOS apps.

- Exponent also allows you to push updates to published apps, while publishing with NativeScript is identical to publishing regular iOS and Android apps.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/react-native [2] https://github.com/NativeScript/NativeScript