[ryandrake]

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the Android/iOS code sharing nut was cracked: Business logic in C or C++ and UI in Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android + NDK). As a bonus, you could bolt a desktop UI on top of the C++ as well.

[realharo]

It's certainly possible, but comes with a large number of its own issues:

- C++ is a way more complicated language with the manual memory management. C is way too low level for things like this.

- Complicated builds if you need to use a bunch of C++ libraries as dependencies.

- Much slower iteration.

- Complicated debugging.

- The need to either write (slow) or generate (constraining) the Java/ObjC bindings.

Then there are things like having to reconcile the lifetime of your C++ objects with the Android Activity/Fragment lifecycles, etc.

If I was faced with the decision of what technology to use for a set of typical mobile apps, I would definitely want to avoid the native C++ path if at all possible.

[LeoNatan25]

With modern C++ language features, the "complicated language with the manual memory management" a lot less obvious or necessary. Debugging is only complicated on Android, where NDK is pain in the ass for some reason, even after so many years of Google developing the toolchain.

[realharo]

>With modern C++ language features, the "complicated language with the manual memory management" a lot less obvious or necessary

Not completely though, you still have to think a lot more about ownership and object lifetimes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfmTagWcqoE), which is a lot better than manual new/delete, but still not as simple as just having a GC.

Plus you have to deal with lifetimes of objects proxied to Java code, where something in the Java code becomes the object's owner. Though you can use a bindings generator like djinni (https://github.com/dropbox/djinni) to handle this for you (with some tradeoffs).

>Debugging is only complicated on Android

It's gotten slightly better recently, but it still sucks.

With Swift it's not trivial either, it's not that easy to set breakpoints into C++ code, stack traces on crashes are often not helpful (so any unhandled C++ exception that you didn't catch and convert into a Swift error is hard to track down, etc.)

[ashark]

Lots of apps (that get made, not that necessarily get used much) are basically CRUD web apps with a smattering of native features being used in a very vanilla way (maybe a little geolocation/gps, maybe you can snap a profile pic with the camera, whatever). Your "shared logic" is HTTP requests, JSON-parsing code, and validating text fields. It would not improve productivity to do that in c/c++ instead of just doing it once each in Swift and Java.

Javascript/RN, yes (at the cost of safety). Plus you can't throw a rock without hitting two JS devs, even in my non-tech-hub city.

Go, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, would also be appropriate for the task (Google, for the love of god, make it a first class citizen on Android and use that as an excuse to refactor your SDK into something that doesn't seem like it was loosely designed by a committee then handed to the Summer interns to implement with no supervision or clear specs).

[realharo]

>at the cost of safety

Are you talking about type safety? Because you can use TypeScript with React Native too, and it's probably a nicer dev experience than plain JS as well.

[erichocean]

That's how we do it as well. Bonus: you can test your business logic without having to run it on a phone.

I'm shocked more people don't do this—I guess they don't know C++?

[LeoNatan25]

Web developers are a dime a dozen - very low barrier to entry, both from learning standpoint, and quality standpoint (sadly). C++ developers - a lot less. C++ developers cost more. Native developers who are also willing to learn C++ are also expensive. My cynical view is that with RN, startups are just able to hire a few web developers instead of having to hire native developers, so it's a lot cheaper.

[realharo]

>Bonus: you can test your business logic without having to run it on a phone.

You can do that with JS (or TypeScript etc.) as well. Even Java (or Kotlin) and Swift, or anything really, if you care enough to separate it from the UI parts.

[pjmlp]

That is my solution as well.

Although I am now eyeing on Xamarin, because I got tired of having to deal with JNI all the time.

[menckenjr]

If you really want code sharing without javascript you might try embedding Lua or Go (Google has a project called go mobile that generates android and iOS frameworks from Go projects).

[steeve]

That's what we're doing, only using Go

[martin_bigio]

couldn't agree more with @realharo. IMHO C++ step learning curve is a no-go for product dev.