We were at Wroclaw for React Native EU this September to meet the React Native community. The first Europe conference only about React Native was exciting and full of awesome talks, and Florian from BAM was there too to give a talk about React Native and native modules: here are a few take aways that he made.

React Native: the native bits by Emil Sjölander

Emil gave an in-depth explanation on how the layout engine is working inside React Native, and how they created yoga at Facebook, the library used for powering flexbox layout inside React Native.

Building of Snack — The React Native Playground by Satyajit Sahoo

Snack is an amazing online tool that you can use to create React Native apps directly from your browser, using your phone to run the app.

This talk gave us explanations about how it is implemented, what the hacks had to be make in order for example to download and run modules from npm. It's an impressive work!

We have been using Snack at BAM in our workshops to teach students how to make apps in no time. This has been a life-saver!

Going Over The Speed Limit by Tal Kol

One of the most advanced talks by Tal Kol. He explained how asynchronous rendering can lead to flickering or other small rendering issues that can make an app feel awkward/not native. The solution in this case is to have synchronous rendering and he explained why and how it could be done inside React Native.

Take a look at the repository containing a proof-of-concept that he made: https://github.com/wix/rn-synchronous-render. Hopefully this is something that will get traction in the community!

Building native modules for React Native by Florian Rival

This one was the talk given by Florian. He explained how the bridge between JS and native works, how native modules can be created and which tool to use to quickly bootstrap them. He then gave an overview of all the native tooling that developers can use to ease and speed-up their work on native modules.

Slides are available here : https://slides.com/florianrival/bridges-to-react-native

Lightning talk: Scaffolding plugins for React Native by Johannes Stein

Johannes explained the need and how to use react-native-create-library, the tool he created to create native modules for React Native.

Lightning talk: React Native Builder by Sanket Sahu

Sanket presented BuilderX, a tool still in development allowing developers and designers to use the same tool to design screens, with the output being Javascript files for React Native!

We look forward to see how this tool could help reduce the iteration between the design and the "real" app and speed-up the development process!

Composable Native APIs by André Staltz

André explained the architecture of Cycle.js based on stream and how it can be used with native libraries to compose them easily.

Florian has not been able to attend the second day of the conference but videos of the conferences should be online soon! We look forward to see Offline first applications in React Native done well by Adrien Thiery, Scaling Mobile Development with React Native by Aaron Greenwald, the talk about ReasonML by Ken Wheeler and the others!





To know more about the conference, follow React Native EU on Twitter. The whole conference was really well prepared and this is an impressive achievement by the team at Callstack! 👏