Five years of React Native at Shopify

Glad they spent some times discussing the downsides. I’m 4 months in to a Hotwire Native replacement for an unmaintained React Native app. The differences are stark and I could definitely see myself picking up Hotwire again for another project if given the same constraints, but I’ve had good experiences with React Native in the past too. Ultimately though I just do not like all the work that has to go into maintaining a large scale React codebase.

Curious what you meant by the last sentence there. Does React uniquely complicate maintenance as a codebase grows?

Theres a constant churn of a bunch of dependencies. Devs add minuscule libraries all the time. And I think some of the best React libraries have been abandoned, which is kinda sad, but nice from a maintenance perspective.

React very much feels like programming using only side-effects and that’s not really a fun experience IMHO. Performance issues are also somewhat difficult to spot in review and not very elegant to solve.

It’s been a few years since I’ve used React Native so maybe things are better now?

This is my experience with all javascript stuff these days. If you leave the codebase even for a few months now you're spending days updating it to all the new breaking library changes. Worse, if your tooling is out of date you're probably spending a week just fighting to fix/change/update the tooling. It's the most brittle tech stack I've ever had to work with.