Ryan Edge, any time someone uses a simple word “speed”, without specifying what exactly, let alone presenting some sources or benchmarks is going to make folks like me rant like this, because it possibly spreads wrong information — which sucks.

So re *development* speed, for a person who does RN dev daily and who has submitted my own Flutter app, IMO Flutter is much much faster. One reason is the tooling is a cohesive whole that “just works”, rather than having to rely on endless IDE plugins, type checking libs like Typescript/Flow and super buggy/unreliable debuggers that I’ve seen thus far with RN. You’re writing Dart code that has type safety built in with all the speed you need.

Second, if the author was referring to the *speed* of apps written in either, it’s impossible to compare, as you said, without writing the same exact app. But with that said, RN has a history of issues with things like framerates, for example.

Architecturally, I don’t see how it’s physically possible to see RN as “faster”, based on it’s bridging mechanism. You have JavaScript communicating with the native SDKs in real time via C/C++ and a queue, using JSON for messages. Here’s an article about it https://hackernoon.com/understanding-react-native-bridge-concept-e9526066ddb8

Flutter on the other hand, compiles to C/C++ ahead of time, so the result is that the native libraries communicate directly with the compiled result without any bridging. “Technology” section here: https://flutter.io/faq/

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts.