Book Image

Professional React Native

By : Alexander Benedikt Kuttig
Book Image

Professional React Native

By: Alexander Benedikt Kuttig

Overview of this book

The React Native framework offers a range of powerful features that make it possible to efficiently build high-quality, easy-to-maintain frontend applications across multiple platforms such as iOS, Android, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and the web, helping you save both time and money. And this book is your key to unlocking its capabilities. Professional React Native provides the ultimate coverage of essential concepts, best practices, advanced processes, and tips for everyday developer problems. The book makes it easy to understand how React Native works under the hood using step-by-step explanations and practical examples so you can use this knowledge to develop highly performant apps. As you follow along, you'll learn the difference between React and React Native, navigate the React Native ecosystem, and revisit the basics of JavaScript and TypeScript needed to create a React Native application. What’s more, you’ll work with animations and even control your app with gestures. Finally, you'll be able to structure larger apps and improve developer efficiency through automated processes, testing, and continuous integration. By the end of this React native app development book, you'll have gained the confidence to build high-performance apps for multiple platforms, even on a bigger scale.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with React Native
5
Part 2: Building World-Class Apps with React Native
12
Part 3: React Native in Large-Scale Projects and Organizations

Getting to know the Hermes engine

Hermes was brought to the React Native community at the React Native EU conference in 2019. Back then, it was already in production in Facebook’s apps for more than a year. It is completely built with mobile in mind, which changes the architectural approach completely. The following figure shows how a modern JS engine works.

Figure 8.1 – Modern JS engine pipeline (inspired by Tsvetan Mikov)

When creating and building JavaScript code, usually there is some transcompiling done to backward-compatible JS code and some JS code minification. This minified JS bundle is then sent to a device and gets executed. JS engines such as JavaScriptCore or V8 try to optimize the execution using just-in-time compilation, which, as described before, is a quite complex process and may store and optimize the wrong code statements. Hermes changes the way this is done completely.

The following figure shows how optimization and compilation...