If you’d asked me a couple years ago my bet would’ve been on Microsoft’s fork of React Native for desktop. They’re clearly actively developing it and using it for their own purposes. But its relative obscurity isn’t a great sign.
Luckiest ideal scenario: something like React Native that really does compile to actual UI APIs for the compile target. Doesn’t have to be JavaScript, but it probably will be because inertia.
Every time I see “native” and “UI” RN is still the only real option which means native. I’d really love to see more options in this space.
Yeah, React Native for Desktop seems really like it's be great (and the apps that use it like messenger for desktop are great). Unfortunately there hasn't been a stable mac release for several versions, and there's no linux version.
Every word in this sentence is the opposite of my experience and understanding. RN feels like a half maintained backwater compared to react for web. Lots of out of date docs, awful debugging experience, inconsistencies between ios and android, fidgety and flakey all the time. And it has all felt like that for a while. So I would beg to differ with "maturing" and would definitely call bs on anyone characterizing it as "mature".
About Flutter, I've never personally used it but last I read its marketshare was continuing to grow fast as RN's plateaued. I love TS and the react ecosystem but RN itself is so crappy that I'm considering dart (did I just say that???). I think architecturally Flutter made the right call to just implement their own components on skia to get perfect consistency across platforms and totally control their own destiny. Sadly they also chose a weird shitty language.
Sort of related, is there a project out there that reimplements enough of dom/css in the canvas to where you could theoretically run a lot of react projects with the canvas as the target instead of the dom itself?
Luckiest ideal scenario: something like React Native that really does compile to actual UI APIs for the compile target. Doesn’t have to be JavaScript, but it probably will be because inertia.
Every time I see “native” and “UI” RN is still the only real option which means native. I’d really love to see more options in this space.