Jamie Birch

From bridgeful, to bridgeless, to Expo Modules and Static Hermes, the landscape of native modules in React Native is ever-evolving. Cross-pollination, however, has always been limited – it is rare for React Native to use native modules from other ecosystems, and vice versa.

In this talk, we introduce Node-API, a popular standard for exposing native APIs to JavaScript in an ABI-stable manner, no matter the engine. Used in Node.js and most other major JavaScript runtimes, it is the ideal technology for sharing native modules cross- ecosystem.

We'll show how it's being used by Microsoft in React Native Windows already, and what it may mean for the future of React Native!

Expo, the official framework of choice for building React Native apps, has both a "managed" workflow (where you purely write JS, just using what the SDK offers) and a "bare" workflow (where you can write custom native code). To opt into the bare workflow, one has to "prebuild" one's apps to expose all the native boilerplate.

Expo Prebuild is widely used, but it can be a little unclear exactly what it does and how it does it all (such as how it can bring your native project back up to date after you bump the Expo SDK version). In particular, its capability of generating native projects from custom templates is underused. Following this talk, though, we hope to change all that!