Balancing Native and JavaScript Code in React Native

React Native's bridge can be your bottleneck or your superpower. Callstack explores the critical tradeoff between JavaScript flexibility and native performance that determines whether your app flies or crawls.

This article from Callstack tackles one of React Native's fundamental architecture decisions: when to keep logic in JavaScript versus when to drop down to native code. It's part of their performance optimization series aimed at teams pushing React Native at scale.

Key Takeaways

• Bridge communication overhead grows with data size and call frequency
• Native modules excel at compute-heavy tasks like image processing
• JavaScript shines for UI logic and rapid iteration cycles
• Batching bridge calls reduces serialization costs significantly
• New Architecture with JSI enables synchronous native calls

The article reveals a specific threshold where moving logic to native actually makes performance worse, not better.