[shroompasta]

I'm curious as I think I'll be making this decision in the near future.

> it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs.

Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice?

As text being the main content for Substack, Its hard for me to imagine why React Native wouldn't be sufficient for a relatively simple app.

Discord, undoubtedly, has more complex UI needs compared to Substack, however it's humming along just fine with React Native.

What makes React Native capable for Discord, but incapable for your needs?

[saagarjha]

Note that Discord's main conversation view is native UITableView for performance.

[shroompasta]

this article suggests otherwise.

https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-achieves-native-ios-per...

> At first, we felt that maybe doing it purely in JavaScript was futile. We spent some time trying to glue together UITableView with React Native, and while we made meaningful progress, it started feeling overly complicated. After stepping back and thinking about what else we could do — it hit us. We already solved this problem once before on the web! We already had an internal List component that virtualizes its children. There is no way we could just drop it into React Native right?

I'm also curious why it took them so many pain points to reach list virtualization as their solution. That would've been my first thought.

[saagarjha]

> We’ve actually implemented our core chat view natively because lists don’t perform well for many dynamic rows.

[shroompasta]

That was their initial problem. Upon further reading, you will find that they found a solution in dealing with Lists with React Native. My initial comment had the answer - they brought in a component that visualizes lists from their web platform, and it worked seamlessly in React Native.

So no, while they initially implemented their core chat view natively, they are using full blown react native as of right now.

[saagarjha]

No, they aren’t. I would know, as I have a debugger attached to the process right now.

[shroompasta]

>The result was a new component we called <FastList>. The team intends to merge these together for cross-platform use and open source it for the community. With that we removed a lot of memory allocations and were down another 70-90ms of render time. We could now scroll the channel members list as fast as we wanted and it kept up admirably.

https://gist.github.com/vishnevskiy/f4ba74adf5cf1d269b860fab...

This is FastList Code. it's 100% javascript, and only imports are lodash, react, and react-native