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Comment by equasar | Hacker News Reader

React Native has a JavaScript layer that hurts performance and it is not truly native as they say. Just do a reach on flutter vs react native and you'll see better explanations and comparisons.

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I’m not sure this really matters for a lot of things anymore. Sorting a few hundred text items in a list, for example, is going to be so fast on modern smartphones that it will not make much of a difference whether it’s done in JavaScript or native.

Maybe a poor example, but I suspect the only times it really makes a difference is significantly computationally expensive tasks

so? most apps are by nature going to be computationally expensive if they want to compete/successfully use all phone features. i made a simple(according to them) corporate data sync app recently and the company wanted a laundry list of features - background sync, smooth scrolling of extremely large datasets, photographic analysis of images taken at tolls(extracting license plate information/classifying vehicles automatically for tracking).

All of this had to be made in a performant way so as to run on phones with 1 gig of ram as the company was giving phones to everyone specifically for just this purpose(and general communication ofc).However it also needed to work on iphones/windows phones(old ones the execs purchased en masse)

Xamarin was the only choice att as react just doesn't work stably on windows phones but i'm excited to see the future

Your app sounds like it used some advanced features, but I don’t think most apps are going to be computationally expensive in the way that local-AI, image processing, or crypto activities might be. I am not sure what qualifies as extremely large datasets, but I’d be surprised if keeping a few dozen objects in order is significantly lower in JS than Swift. Yes, it may be an order of magnitude slower - or ten orders - but that seems negligible if the total time for processing is still nanoseconds. Guess it always comes down to the task at hand.

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