On: Ask HN: Is React impacted by Meta layoff?

[shrisukhani]

RN's not really core to Meta tbh. The most important surfaces are all built either natively or with NT / Blocks I think. Also ~19 months outdated though.

[zffr → shrisukhani]

I interviewed at Meta more recently than that, and the engineers I spoke with mentioned the same thing.

[olalonde → shrisukhani]

Do you work at Meta? This tweet from 2020 seems to imply it is used pretty extensively: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1234801516843819009

[battery_glasses → olalonde]

I was at Meta when this was tweeted and I think he must be referring to mostly internal apps. AFAIK the only part of the FB app that was heavily React Native was FB Marketplace.

By 2021 there were edicts in some departments that absolutely no new projects were to written with RN, with the emphasis moving towards their server-side rendering frameworks (Native Templates and Bloks.)

[no_wizard → battery_glasses]

Wonder if that means React Native will either get turned over to a foundation or will be de-prioritized / ended as a project

[gavinray → shrisukhani]

What's "NT / Blocks"?

[shrisukhani → gavinray]

Sorry about that, should've clarified!

NT - Native Templates. It's a cross-platform app dev framework where you can write Hack on the server once to make surfaces for both iOS and Android.

Blocks is similar to NT but in Python (IG backend is all Python)

[tristanbvk → shrisukhani]

How does it work. In the sense that what does it provide the client side. Does the client get served pre-rendered interfaces of some sort?

Trying to figure it out as the Meta apps are very nice UX wise and maybe web technologies have come a long way to "feel native" hence i am in disbelief at the leaps and bounds being made.

[shrisukhani → tristanbvk]

Not super sure about how the internals work but iirc this is the flow:

- Eng writes Hack/Python code on backend with a view tag-ish

- Client has native components for NT and Blocks. The native component references tag-ish from above and pulls code / config

- The code / config returned from the backend gets translated into Litho/ComponentKit components (so native Android UI elements) and rendered

[tristanbvk → shrisukhani]

Interesting! Thanks for the explanation!

[emptysea → shrisukhani]

what is `tag-ish`? Having trouble googling it

[emptysea → shrisukhani]

Interesting, does it cross compile a hack based DSL to iOS and android?

Curious to hear more!

[gavinray → shrisukhani]

Ah, got it, thank you!

[camdat → gavinray]

Think full-featured bootstrap components. Design + FE build "Bloks", product teams use them everywhere.

[flakyfilibuster → shrisukhani]

source? "tbh" and "I think" is cool and all, however I could also just throw out things I believe

Would be nice to know where you get your information from, that RN isn't core to Meta

[metadat → shrisukhani]

What do NT and Block mean in this context?