Why 2022 Will Be a Huge Year for React-Native
Written by: Daniel Friyia, Agile Software Engineer, TribalScale
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The React-Native (RN) community can seem quiet at times. This is especially true if you are new to the ecosystem and don’t know who the key influencers in the community are. Unlike iOS or Android, big developments to React-Native are not met with large conference announcements and fanfare. Instead, they are reliant on social media and developers making recommendations to one another. I sorely wish our community was better at PR when major developments take place, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Knowing this, I thought I would take a break from my usual tutorials and do my civic duty as a member of the React-Native community to promote changes to the ecosystem I think will make a huge difference in 2022.
More progress on the new architecture
The first big development we will see in 2022 is the new React-Native architecture becoming increasingly more mature. I know not everyone is up to speed on what the components of the RN architecture are, so let me explain. The RN refactor has three parts: Turbo Modules, Fabric and Codegen. Turbo Modules allow JavaScript to hold a reference to C++ host objects and manipulate them. Fabric is the new renderer for RN that is meant to increase rendering performance and make Android and iOS UI behaviours more consistent with one another. Finally, Codegen is used to generate native code at build time. A great explanation of this can be found in the React-Native Radio (RNR) Podcast 222 with React-Native’s Engineering Manager Kevin Gozali.
In the RNR Podcast, Kevin let us know that up to this point TurboModules and Fabric have been mostly completed. In accordance with his statement, Meta’s React-Native blog just announced that the architecture will be open-sourced this year so that everyone has a chance to try it out. It will be exciting to see all the new libraries and app optimizations that come out of the release!
Moving towards Hermes as default across all React-Native platforms
This next point builds on the last related to the RN re-architecture. Late last year, Meta announced they are working towards making Hermes the default JavaScript Engine on all platforms.
Although Hermes has been available for a while, especially on mobile, it’s great to see it will be a core part of the RN ecosystem moving forward. Hermes is a Meta’s JS engine tailored specifically for running with RN, as opposed to engines like V8 that are optimized for Google Chrome. Using Hermes results in faster app start-up times, less memory usage and smaller apps. Basically, it’s a much welcomed overall buff for the RN ecosystem 😅. I’ve been enabling it on all the demo projects I write for Medium and will be enabling it on all future projects even before it becomes default.
Major improvements to animations
Another big development in the RN community this year is going to be animations. Mid last year we saw the release of React-Native ReAnimated 2 which allowed us to have access to the native UI thread. As the library continues to gain popularity this year, we will see the performance of animations improve by leaps and bounds on lower performance devices where, in the past, RN animations would struggle because of the old bridging architecture.
As if ReAnimated 2 wasn’t enough of a leap forward, a few months ago, development on a new, equally powerful, animations project was announced. Twitter followers of William Candillon and Shopify Engineering will be aware that a new project called React-Native-Skia is being worked on.
This library brings Skia functionality to RN. For those who don’t know, Skia is the rendering engine used by Google Chrome, Android and Flutter that gives the user control over every Pixel on the screen. It is especially popular for its two dimensional drawing optimizations. It will be interesting to follow this library’s journey to production readiness this year. I know I’ll be following this work on William Candillon’s YouTube channel.
Final thoughts
Thanks for giving this a read! I hope you’ll find this article useful coming into 2022. If there are any parts of the React-Native ecosystem you think will be significant in the coming year feel free to share them in the comments. It would be great to share the cool emerging libraries and technologies everyone is working with.
Daniel is an Agile Software Developer specializing in Flutter and React-Native. As much as he likes cross platform he is passionate about all types of mobile development including native iOS and Android and is always looking to advance his skill in the mobile development world.
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