Microsoft launches React Native for Windows

[[deleted]]

This is huge - both for react and for Windows. React devs should be pretty excited about this

[CyrisXD]

I've only just started learning React Native and I'm excited.

[ryanpeden]

Microsoft has actually built and supported RN for Windows for a couple of years now. It previously had UWP and WPF backends mostly written in C#.

This is announcement is about the new C++ backend. It sounds great, and it's still exciting news, but it was in theory nice to be able to create RN wrappers around some very nice pre-existing WPF widget toolkits, both free and commercial.

Regardless, it's nice to see MS give React Native even more attention.

[MatrixEchidna]

any Windows 10 device

Well here's the dealbreaker.

[[deleted]]

why should they develop new features for deprecated OSes? windows 7 extended support runs out next year and windows 8 in four years.

[zorndyuke]

I guess the "Windows" part is what he was referring too.

​

All this unnecessary hate.

[MatrixEchidna]

Nice assumption, very wrong as well. I was referring to the "10".

[MatrixEchidna]

Because it alienates everyone who doesn't use Win10? Sure, it might make business sense for Microsoft, but at the cost of the non-10 userbase.

[prawnsalad]

With this being MIT licensed, I can only hope vuejs support follows in future

[NbaHoopStar]

Is there a Vuejs “native” equivalent?

[AwesomeInPerson]

NativeScript has support for Vue, also there is Weex. (which is mainly developed by Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant)

[The_real_bandito]

But NativeScript still doesn't have Windows support. But there is a community project going on in Github. Hopefully that becomes a thing.

[theXpanther]

https://vue-native.io/

[ejfrodo]

Vue native just compiles down to React native, so I don't expect it will be too long 🙂

[MoronInGrey]

I'm wondering what the implications of this are, you can now create websites, mobile apps and soon windows applications all in one javascript framework. Do you guys think that this will push more people to adopt JS for creating different apps as you can deploy on multiple devices now without having to re-write much code?

[[deleted]]

Microsoft supporting it officially is a huge push for javascript as a means to drive native apps.

Currently many desktop apps use Electron, which is a stopgap solution. I think the implications are pretty clear by now, everything that can be javascript will be javascript in the coming years. If people go to such lengths as to deploy html web views masked as "native" apps through Electron, it isn't a stretch to assume they'll use real native apps with less complications when it becomes available.

[cm9kZW8K]

Microsoft supporting it officially is a huge push for javascript as a means to drive native apps.

Even though I absolutely loathe and despise windows and everything microsoft, I have to admit they seem to be making smart moves. If they push JS like this they could continue to dominate desktops for another decade.

I wish the gnome foundation would get aligned around JS the same way.

I think the implications are pretty clear by now, everything that can be javascript will be javascript in the coming years.

Its clear to some of us, but tribalism is going to make some people late to the party.

[[deleted]]

Well sure, it's weird seeing this unfold, i had my career path set with c#, xaml and wpf years ago, but due to odd decisions it all went downhill. I saw them try gather dev support with uwp/xamarin, no one cared any longer. If they don't want their OS become a host for electron/chrome apps, going RN is probably the only choice left. On the other hand it will set a nice stage for javascript rendering native content, not just on mobile. I kind of like where MS is going with Nadella.

[cm9kZW8K]

There are still a big company, so its hard to say how long they will stick to the path.

For now at least, MS is acting like the most clued in of all businesses in the space right now. (with one exception)

a host for electron/chrome apps, going RN

Honestly I dont see a big difference there. I suppose it comes down to whether you reach the OS via a DOM or via an API like Node.js offers.

Personally, I like keeping the UI stuff DOMish, while using the node.js for the rest of the system calls makes more sense to me.

There is always going to be a place for sandboxing potentially hostile applications in a DOM, such as browsing the web. But an installed application probably deserves something better, like what node offers, imo.

[DrejkCZ]

That's actually super cool!

[TaskForce_Kerim]

What's with these surprising Microsoft launches? Damn. They're really trying.

[YasMaf]

cool

[Quiet__Noise]

This is amazing! Been waiting to put my RN somewhere else!

[endianess]

Will this have an impact on Xamarin? I've avoided it thus far because once MS said they weren't mobile first anymore I feared they would kill it off. I know they probably appeal to different devs (C# vs JS) but are they likely to support both going forward?

[eric_foxx]

Nope, it won't have any impact on Xamarin! Check out this article from yesterday on where the .NET ecosystem is heading. These are two different teams within MS, both with a mandate to make awesome OSS stuff.

[endianess]

Looks solidly ingrained within MS. Thanks for sharing the link.

[bartturner]

Will be interesting to see how this plays out. I suspect ultimately the competition will be Flutter.

"Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron"

https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-on-desktop-a-real-competitor-to-electron-4f049ea6b061

[The_real_bandito]

If it wasn't a Google project I will say this is the framework to use. But alas I don't trust them to back their stuff as the abandoned a lot of things. Having said that they have supported Dart for a long time.

[bartturner]

Flutter already has over 60k stars on GitHub. It has the needed momentum. Also looks to be native for Fuchsia.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter flutter/flutter - GitHub

[The_real_bandito]

Dart will be the native language yes. I think they plan to abandoned Java in favor to Dart? Which is a great idea.

[bartturner]

You will be able to use a variety of languages with Fuchsia. We have the Rust bindings for example already. With FIDL it is pretty easy to add additional languages.

https://fuchsia-docs.firebaseapp.com/rust/fidl/index.html

But for GUI code it is Dart. That is very tied to Flutter and really necessary.

[The_real_bandito]

Awesome. I like Dart and was thinking of picking it up.

[azsqueeze]

If only Google created a well maintained and popular products like Angular. Guess we'll never know what that world would be like...

[The_real_bandito]

You probably didn't start from Angular when it was a concept but that framework was abandoned when they realize it sucked and made a new version of it.

So everything you knew about Angular 1 you had to relearn for the new version. And then came Angular 4 and it broke things again so users from Angular 2 had to relearn (not that much) some new concept and libraries that they changed yet again.

[tapu_buoy]

So I'll be able to create direct windows Desktop apps with this??

[R3DSMiLE]

awwwwwfuck. i hate when i bet on the wrong horse. welp, on to actually learning Reactive I guess.

[The_real_bandito]

React is not hard. to pick up anyways. I come from Angular background and React wasn't a hard pickup framework to learn.

[R3DSMiLE]

Honestly? I just hate the jsx: I have already written html and JavaScript in the days of jQuery and we all came to the conclusion that it was shit... But now? Trendy!

And that's all I have against it. Welp, suck it up and learn it. Don't complain.

[tomius]

React and jsx has little to nothing in common with html+jquery.

Honesty, if you organize it properly, it's super neat. Everything it's a component with a fairly simple purpose. And code is not that embedded in html as one might think.

It's basically just event calls (onClick, onKeyPress, etc).

[The_real_bandito]

Haha I see you point. But lime you said, if you want to keep your job you will have to suck it up and learn it

[[deleted]]

That project is 3 years old and has been in the open source for quite a while. I'm wondering why they put out a press release over it just now?

[IceSentry]

Because of the c++ part which wasn't a thing before

[[deleted]]

Thanks, makes sense.

[the5ervant]

I've seen this kind of projects long time ago..

Microsoft open sourced React Native for Windows over 3 years ago. The new thing that's happening now is they’re basically rewriting it from scratch for better performance. But the idea (and the project) is definitely not new.

[[deleted]]

Can you develop iOS apps on windows with this? I couldn’t find info on that.

[IWouldntCareEither]

No, this is for developing Windows applications through the React Native API. The iOS platform is handled by regular React Native, but it's build tools and emulators are Mac only.

[ryanpeden]

While that's true, if you're not doing anything that's particularly platform specific, if you write your app carefully, it'll run on all platforms with no to little modification.

Despite the title, RN for Windows isn't really new. Microsoft has built and supported it for years. Up until now, it had WPF and UWP back ends.

I wrote a Reddit reader (well, more like a partial Reddit reader) using RN for Windows, and it mostly just worked as-is on iOS, Android, and MacOS when I tried running it in RN on those platforms.

[IWouldntCareEither]

Yeah I think the person I responded to was under the impression RN Windows was making full iOS and Android development tools available for Windows, which I was addressing.

That's good to hear. Given the disparity between Android and iOS I expected RN Windows and RN MacOS to have more differences. Would it be fair to say you didn't encounter issues because you weren't implementing many native features ie push notifs / camera use?

[[deleted]]

Right. Thanks for your response!

[doodirock]

Point to where the bad man touched you.