React Native provides a pretty performant list component out of the box. It is extremely flexible, supports rendering almost any component you can imagine inside of it, and renders them rather quickly. If you'd like to read some more examples of how to work with ListView, there are a couple of recipes in this book, including Displaying a list of items in Chapter 2, Creating a Simple React Native App, that use it. The React Native ListView is built on top of ScrollView to achieve the flexibility of rendering variable-height rows with any view component.
The major performance and resource drawback of the ListView component occurs when you are working with an extremely large list. As the user scrolls through the list, the next page of rows is rendered at the bottom. The invisible rows at the top can be set to be removed from the render tree,...