this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

There’s definitely overhead to spinning up and running a JS interpreter (although it uses Hermes instead of V8, which helps) as well as communicating between JS and the native layer. I think the extent to which that stuff results in bad performance on its own is greatly exaggerated and is acceptable for a lot of use cases.

For the extra effort of learning how to optimize RN code, you get the benefits of:

  • not maintaining 3 codebases to deploy to iOS, Android, and the web
  • transferable knowledge if you have a lot of JS and/or React devs who don’t know the languages for native dev
  • OTA updates, meaning you don’t need Google and Apple’s approval every single time you wanna change styling on a button or fix a bug and your users can’t remain on ancient buggy versions forever

I’d say when dev resources are limited, React Native is a good choice. Was it a good choice for Microsoft? Seems like the answer is no, but that could easily be the result of bad org charts just as much as the failure of individual devs.

As far as vibe coding goes, I was very happy with it right up until I wasn’t. I hit the same “this is a mess I’d better rewrite it” wall I always do with side projects except I hit it faster. At work I’ve found AI useful for speeding up monotonous tasks, but I’ve never had luck with just letting it fly and not giving the code a close review as soon as it’s generated. Prompting AI to fix a bug it created seems to create more bugs just as often.