[marstall]

rn setup can be hard - but consider the problem space - two different operating systems, two different build systems. if 1 day is the max you're willing to put in to investigate build/config errors, there are very few dev environments you're going to succeed in.

Take, for example, native iOS development. For any dev, that involves regular bouts of multi-day configuration hell. Xcode is a huge beast and cryptic for beginners. Add in multiple third party libraries like firebase and it's a tossup which is harder, native or RN.

Toss in Android support, which is the main reason to use RN, and then you will see an order of magnitude improvement in your RN config.

Toss in web support, which RN has, and you're in a deeper hell.

[jamil7]

> Take, for example, native iOS development. For any dev, that involves regular bouts of multi-day configuration hell. Xcode is a huge beast and cryptic for beginners. Add in multiple third party libraries like firebase and it's a tossup which is harder, native or RN.

Hard disagree here, to me this is one of the parts of native iOS development that is far, far better than web development. The web makes up for this with other strengths, but there is no way they're even comparable setup wise.

[marstall]

I guess we had a different experience - perhaps it is better now. my experience with native development was around 2014 with the objectiveC to Swift transition and that was its own hell - but I remember spending a lot of time, maybe 20-30% of my time I would guess, staring down weird build errors.

[jamil7]

Oh yeah that period was rough. Xcode and Swift are a lot more stable these days. I guess my experience is also tainted by webpack-heavy JS work from years ago that was a dependency/tooling nightmare. It seems better now with the newer bundlers.