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by tov_objorkin 2409 days ago
Once i have a dream about RN application for iOS/Android without Xcode and AndroidStudio.

Started with Expo, great tool if you don't have native modules. But i have, very complex search library in Rust. After few attempts the code was converted to asmjs (RN doesn't support wasm). So i have JS-only codebase that works on Expo. Livecoding (a bit slow beause of large js codebase) and easy deploymnet on all platforms.

After release users starts complain about performance. RN fetch API doesn't support binaries, everything passed back and forth as base64. Some low-mid tier phones got stuck for few minutes. Also RN fetch doesn't support progress and a lot of other thing.

Decision was to start using native libraries. Ehh, goodby sweety Expo...

The lesson was learned, if you have complex application don't expect too much without heavy investment. JS is ugly and unpredictable as usualy. Overall experience is ok/mehh, but not great.

For the next project i give Qt5 a chance.
1 comments
tracker1 2409 days ago
May want to also look at MS/Xamarin development, I know a few people that really like it. Though, RN seems a bit more popular. For that matter, in what ways is JS unpredictable? Generally combined with Redux or something similar, I've found it to be fairly consistent and predicatble.
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tov_objorkin 2409 days ago
About five years ago i have a dream, that i can abandon all this peasant C/C++ development and jump into mono/xamarin train. As a main product we have Linux ARM/MIPS karaoke machine with optional remote control via desktop/mobile apps. The idea was to use same code every where.

- Tooling for Linux was horrible, like really! - Alien mobile UI look and feel - One can not simple build mobile app for desktop. - New shiny search engine prototype doesn't fit into low tier Phone RAM. - Mono Hello world application on MIPS device with 128RAM uses about 28 mb of RAM. - 400 MHz cpu have really hard times with GC, nogo for soft-realtime. - No seamless integration with native code, using libs like ffmpeg is crazy hard. - F# was 2nd citizen in that time!

Now things changed, but still imho Linux is not a good choose for .net, also MS force you to use Azure/Cloud/etc infrastructure.

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tracker1 2409 days ago
I was thinking in the context of mobile.. TBH, depending on my needs, I'd probably just fallback to an electron app for desktop at this point. Not good for lighter systems though.

.Net doesn't force Azure/Cloud at all. I know all the MS demos tend in that direction, but you can absolutely use it all internally. I've worked on several backends targeting docker and linux with .Net core at this point. Even ARM as a target is decent. GUI, no idea on that, I tend to prefer react+redux+material-ui there.

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tov_objorkin 2409 days ago
About JS, i made wrong assumption that we entered v8 era and my number crunching code should work reasonable fast everywhere.
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tracker1 2409 days ago
Gotcha... depending on size/scale of numbers, Python is probably the only general purpose scripting language I would trust for that (though don't actually use Python, it's not what I work on).
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