| Great article. I started iOS programming in late 2009 and had solid experience of native mobile programming (iOS/Android) and web frontend/backend (RoR/Node.js/React/Go) before I started to use React Native in late 2016. I totally agree with the auther on what work well and what don't work well about React Native. Sad to see Airbnb sunsetting React Native. In my opinion, 2 of the reasons Airbnb had more and more issues with React Native are: 1. They don’t adopt type checking for JavaScript. “We explored adopting flow but cryptic error messages led to a frustrating developer experience. We also explored TypeScript but integrating it into our existing infrastructure such as babel and metro bundler proved to be problematic.” “A side-effect of JavaScript being untyped is that refactoring was extremely difficult and error-prone.” This is absolutely not just "a side-effect". In a real project, many developers modify the same code base, and the interfaces (Classes, function paramenters, props, etc) are changed frequently. I think type checking system, e.g. Flow, is a must for writing JavaScript code for either backend or frontend. My team is using Flow, and I ask my team members to adopt type checking as much as possible. When I see something like this funcA(a, b), I always ask the developer to change it to funcA(a: TypeA, b: TypeB): TypeC. It is really very helpful, especailly when we need to change code. 2. They don’t ask engineers to keep most code in JavaScript. “Often times, it is not clear whether code should be written in native or React Native. Naturally, an engineer will often choose the platform that they are more comfortable which can lead to unideal code.” All logic and UI should be written in JavaScript. Native code should only be used when we cannot do in JavaScript or the performance is very bad. When I am using React Native, I do miss the simplicity of writing and debugging native code. But when you need to support both iOS and Android, it's great to just keep one code base in JavaScript. Again, espeically when you need to change the code frequently, you don't need to do the some thing twice. (One for iOS, the other for Android.) |