State Of React Native 2018
Article Summary
Facebook's React Native team just dropped a major announcement: they're completely rearchitecting the framework. After 5 years of learning what works (and what doesn't), they're rebuilding the internals while keeping your existing apps running.
This 2018 status update from the React Native core team at Facebook reveals how the framework powers massive products like Marketplace (800M monthly users) and the Oculus Go companion app. But success brought architectural limitations that needed fixing.
Key Takeaways
- Rearchitecting threading model to enable synchronous JavaScript calls on any thread
- Adding async rendering for multiple priorities and simpler data handling
- Simplifying bridge for direct native/JavaScript calls and better debugging tools
- New architecture enables native navigation, gestures, and components without hacks
- 2500+ commits from 500+ contributors in past year
React Native is getting a complete architectural overhaul to fix the limitations of its original asynchronous, serializable bridge design while maintaining backward compatibility.
About This Article
React Native had trouble in hybrid apps. The asynchronous bridge design meant JavaScript couldn't make synchronous calls, and serialization caused extra memory copying between native and JavaScript layers.
Facebook rebuilt React Native from the ground up. They added async rendering from React 16, made the VM and bundler swappable, and kept everything backward compatible so it fit better with the JavaScript ecosystem.
The project attracted over 500 contributors who made more than 2,500 commits each year. React Native now powers Facebook's Marketplace, which has 800 million monthly users, and the Oculus Go companion app.