React Native Rearchitecture with G2i Team

React Native allows developers to build native applications for iOS and Android using components written in the React JavaScript framework. These ReactJS components render to native application code by going over a JavaScript bridge, a message bus that communicates between JavaScript code and native iOS or Android runtimes.

For most mobile application use cases, React Native works well. But in some cases, the platform suffers from performance issues due to the functionality of the JavaScript bridge. For example, mobile games with high demands on graphics, networking, and fast real-time updates to the UI can stutter when using React Native.

To address the performance issues of React Native, the core team working on React Native at Facebook is rearchitecting the React Native runtime within a project called Fabric. Fabric consists of changes to the threading model, the data handling system, and the JavaScript bridge.

Chris Severns and Lee Johnson work at G2i, a group of React and React Native specialists. Chris and Lee join the show to discuss the rearchitecture, including the engineering history of React, the technical debt within the React project, and the vision that the React team has for the future. We also discuss Google’s Flutter project, a cross-platform native framework with a different architectural model than React Native.

Transcript

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