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Comment by s_y_n_t_a_x | Hacker News Reader

It emulates the UI, so the fake is noticeable, and it will be hard for them to maintain perfect 1:1.

RN on the other hand bridges the native UI w/ your code via a JS bridge. The downside is the bridge can be a bottleneck so you have to be careful how much you congest it. The result is being able to expose every native functionality and abstract it anyway you want using React extensions.

Flutter plans to target desktop and web, but RN is ready for this today.

Flutter requires you to learn Dart, a Google only language. RN you can use JS or TypeScript.

Are you really going to trust that Flutter & Dart are around tomorrow w/ Google's record? Why oh why would you build your project with something that risky.

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> It emulates the UI, so the fake is noticeable, and it will be hard for them to maintain perfect 1:1.

I don't think 'emulate' is the right word. It renders it's UI. I don't get 'how the fake is noticeable'. It might be a little bit different, but the average person won't pick it up.

To me, this is one of it's big upsides. It doesn't have to do all the translation to native. The performance is good. It's easy to write. No quirks of either OS. Though you do have to worry about the individual OS's if you're doing something lower level, but you have the power to do so, so that's still a plus.

It renders a UI similar to the native UI by mimicking it, it emulates it. It meets every meaning of the word.

It's a different approach than RN, but in my opinion, it's flawed.

This isn't anything new in the desktop realm at least. QT vs wxWidgets. QT renders it's own UI, which is great if you are going for your own look, same with Flutter. wxWidgets and RN both shine by being able to wrap the native platform and bridge it.

Eventually your "good enough for the average person" implementation will be out-of-date, and you will always be worse than native, because it's "good enough". That's when you start getting into flaws of cross-platform.

With React Native, it's the exact same, not "good enough". You can wrap any native functionality, and you don't have to maintain copies of visuals and physics for each platform you want to fake.

Yes there are some compatibility issues that you have to address when you try to abstract them, but that will come up regardless of which framework you use.

Currently I'm working on a solution that resolves all of these RN issues across platforms.

P.S. users can tell, they just may not be able to point it out.

Emulate has another meaning in the technology world too though, so it might be confusing.

RN has to keep the bridge up to date with best practices/deprecation, etc... so that seems like a bigger risk if support was lost. Xamarin did the same and had it's fair share of issues. I'd rather use something with it's own rendering engine. Way less 'magic' that can break.

I don't like coding React/HTML/JS/CSS. It's way easier to write UIs in Flutter IMO. And honestly, I don't even like the aesthetic of native iOS either. I prefer material. I see why web devs would prefer RN though, so there's obviously a huge need for it.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. These all are perfectly reasonable concerns. I've seen many GUI frameworks fail because of a mix of these reasons.

Either Google or someone else w/ a vengeance follows me around and downvotes me haha.

Can you downvote in this website?

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