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by pjmlp 1743 days ago
Have the UI defined in JSON or whatever rocks your boat, even HTML, but then map those concepts to native widgets.

Some native apps on Android/iOS do exactly this, with UI coming from Web API calls.
1 comments
nicoburns 1743 days ago
Isn't this exactly what a system like react-native provides? Just off the shelf for commom patterns, and backed by a turing complete language. If you have yo build out the UI toolkit yourself yhen you haven't really saved much.
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pjmlp 1743 days ago
Not at all because it isn't native to the platform.

These solutions use the native SDKs of the platform directly.

So you are e.g. using Java/Kotlin on Android and Swift/Objective-C on iOS.

React native brings JavaScript and VM for the ride.

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nicoburns 1743 days ago
Is a JavaScript VM really that different to intepreted JSON files? With react-native, the UI controls are using the platform native toolkits, there's just an abstraction layer on top.

Checkout https://github.com/gorhom/react-native-bottom-sheet for example.

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pjmlp 1743 days ago
Definitely, because first JSON was just a possible format, secondly, whatever format is used, it is serialisation format for a native language, using the native APIs of the platform.

There is no interpretation going on.

The abstraction layer for react native has JavaScript engine in the middle, plus a marshaling layer to go through OS APIs, and on Android is double slow, because NDK only has game related APIs, anything else requires a second marshaling call to go through JNI.

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