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Hey notJust Developers,
The most exciting news in React Native is that V0.75 was released just a couple of days ago with over 1491 commits from 165 contributors 🔥. Major highlights are:
Let's first understand what Yoga is in React Native.
Yoga — the layout engine
Yoga is an open-source layout engine developed by Meta. The engine is responsible for how UI elements (such as buttons, text, images, etc.) are arranged and positioned within a user interface. Yoga calculates these four layout properties for each UI element:
Positioning
Sizing
Alignment
Spacing
You can create responsive layouts with Yoga that adapt to different screen sizes and orientations. It also implements a widely used concept called CSS Flexbox in React Native. So you already feel that yoga is the heart (♥︎) of React Native flexible UI.
NOTE:Yoga 3.0 came out with React Native 0.74. You can learn about the new features at notjust.dev/blog.
What’s new in Yoga 3.1?
One of the most highly requested features is the support for % values in various places, such as gap properties (e.g., gap, rowGap, columnGap) and translation properties (e.g., translateY, translateX ). The great news is that Yoga 3.1 now has this support 🚀.
Today we will explore the code for the gap property. Let’s take a look at the image below.
Did you notice that the right part of the above image has a perfect 10% gap between each of the three items? Yeah, that’s because it is running on React Native 0.75 with Yoga 3.1. However, the left image couldn’t achieve the gap perfectly due to React Native 0.74 with Yoga 3.0. Now let’s take a look at the code for the above image.
In the above code, we used the property gap with % for the innerContainer style, which made that 10% gap perfectly shown in the above image.
NOTE: In React Native 0.75, the gap and translation properties can now accept both point and % values.
New Architecture Stabilization
Let’s first understand a bit about both the Old & New Architecture of React Native.
Old Architecture
React Native previously used a bridge to communicate between the JavaScript layer and the Native layer. The Native layer is written in C++, Objective C, Java, or kotlin to access native features like cameras, sensors, etc. Unfortunately, the Bridge has some limitations.
One main limitation is that each time one layer communicates with another, it involves serializing (converting JS Object to JSON String) and deserializing (converting JSON String back to JS Object) data. Since the conversion takes time, this process adds a performance issue to the communication flow.
New Architecture in Action 🚀
The good news is that the React Native team was able to replace the bridge with an interface called JSI (JavaScript Interface). It was written in C++ and it opens up all the native features available to your JS code, which means that you can call native methods without any data serialization or deserialization, making the app super fast. And yeah, this new communication flow is called New Architecture 🙌.
New Architecture Now in Beta
Since 2018, the React Native team has been working on the New Architecture. In March 2022, they made the New Architecture available as an experimental option in React Native 0.68. Finally, on May 16 of this year (2024), they promoted the New Architecture from experimental toBeta. In the Beta phase, the team is working hard to fix bugs and add all missing features to the New Architecture. They also announced that they expect to have a stable release with the New Architecture by the end of 2024.
What’s New V0.75?
As part of making the New Architecture stable, the team has fixed several bugs in React Native 0.75. One of them is “textAlign not working with inline views on Android.” The good news is that it has been fixed in 0.75 🎯. Let’s take a look at the image below.
In the above image, we see text with an image (react native logo) as an inline view (meaning in the same line). To improve the UI, it is natural to want the logo to be centered along with the text when applying the textAlign property as the center. However, you may notice that on the left side of the above image, the React Native logo is not properly centered with the text, while on the right side, it is perfectly centered because of React Native 0.75. Amazing, right? Below is the code for the above image.
// Component Code
function App() {
return (
<Text style={styles.text}>
This is
<Image source={{ uri: "REACT_NATIVE_LOGO_URL" }} style={styles.image} />
an example of inline view with textAlign center.
</Text>
);
}
// Component Styleconst styles = StyleSheet.create({
text: {
textAlign: "center", // This now works correctly with inline views
},
image: {
width: 50,
height: 50,
},
});
Recommendation to use Frameworks
Earlier this year at the React Conf, the React Native team recommended the way to build a React Native app is now through a framework, such as Expo. Let’s get back to the stage 🚀.
Why need a Framework?
To understand the importance of a framework, Nicola Corti from Meta presented an amazing talk at App.js Conf 2024just a couple of months ago. He showed us a chart that presents what the Core of React Native can do and what a Framework (such as Expo) can do. Let’s take a look at the chart below.
From the above image, the brown sections show the responsibilities of the Core of React Native, and the green sections show the responsibilities of a Framework. At the present moment, we are very lucky that the Expo team has created a production-grade framework for us, which provides all the necessary tools (mentioned in the chart above) to make our app ready for the Apple and Play Stores without any hassle. Finally, we can recall a quote from the stage of React Conf, which highlights the need for a framework.
Changes for the Recommendation 💁♂️
So, to make the recommendation of using Expo more appropriate, the React Native team has announced the sunset of the react-native init command as of December 31st, 2024. The team mentioned that instead of the init command, you can start with Expo.
NOTE: The react-native init command is used to create a new React Native project from scratch without any frameworks.
Expo SDK 51 supports
We can now say that Expo is an integral part of React Native, as it is the only react native framework with huge popularity due to its complete package of production-grade app development tools. The Expo team also sees this and has quickly added support for React Native 0.75 with Expo SDK 51. Special thanks to Gabriel Donadel.
NOTE: The default React Native version for Expo SDK 51 will continue to be 0.74. However, you can choose to use 0.75with Expo SDK 51 by following the steps mentioned here.
Auto-linking performance improvements
To understand better, let’s first understand a bit of Auto-linking.
What is Auto-linking?
Auto-linking is a feature introduced in React Native 0.60 that simplifies the process of linking native modules (connecting native code with JS code) to your React Native project. Before Auto-linking, when you added a new library, you would need to manually link it to your project using tools like CocoaPods for iOS or Gradle for Android. Auto-linking automates this process, making it easier to install any native modules (libraries) with a simple install command without additional configuration.
Two Steps of Auto-linking
When a developer runs an npm or yarn command to install a native module package into a React Native app, the package is first downloaded into the app’s node_modules directory. After the installation is complete, the auto-linkingprocess starts. This auto-linking process is completed in two steps.
Discovery Process Step: This process again has two steps.
Scanning: Right after the native module is downloaded, the core of React Native scans your entire project to find the newly added library.
Identifying: After scanning, the core of React Native identifies the newly installed library and gathers information about it, such as its configuration and dependencies.
Code Generation Step: Once the discovery process is complete, the core of React Native now generates the necessary code to link the library’s native code to your project’s JS code.
Performance Boost in 0.75
As Expo is the only recommended framework by the React Native team, both teams made a great decision to split the responsibility of auto-linking into two parts, which created a significant performance boost. From now on, the Discovery Process Step (shown above) will be handled by the Expo framework, and the Code Generation Step will be managed by the core of React Native 🔥.
If you are using the latest Expo SDK 51 in your projects, you can enable this new auto-linking feature (performance boost) by setting the environment variableEXPO_UNSTABLE_CORE_AUTOLINKING=1.
Performance Benchmark
With Expo SDK 51 and React Native 0.75, the auto-linking step for React Native libraries (which are not Expo modules) is now faster — up to ~6.5x faster on Android and ~1.5x faster on iOS. Let’s try it today 🚀.
That’s it 🙌
React Native 0.75 introduces support for percentage values in layouts, enhances the New Architecture, and includes various bug fixes and performance improvements.
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