TikTok just released its React Native killer…

Key Takeaways

it's the moment we've all been waiting for a brand new game-changing blazingly Fast JavaScript framework just hit the timeline yesterday B dance the company that gave the world the gift of social media crack via Tik Tok gave the world another gift in the form of an open-source multi-platform app development framework called links developers can throw fossilized relics like react native and flutter in the garbage and rewrite their native mobile apps from scratch with shiny new rust based tooling and a high performance dual threaded UI rendering engine like react native it empowers web Developers to build shoddy IOS and Android apps with JavaScript but Lynx claims to achieve smoother Pixel Perfect uis and faster launch times compared to other crossplatform tools that's a big claim and in today's video we'll try out links and find out if it's a legit react native killer it is March 6 20125 and you're watching the code report lyns is not just another half-baked GitHub project written by a 19-year-old on prescription amphetamines it's not the terminal browser with the same name but rather a production ready framework that's already in use in hi trffic apps at Tik Tok it doesn't the main Tik Tok app where you would post your cringe Dance videos but it does power the search panel Tik Tok studio and a bunch of other ancillary apps I find this very interesting because bite dance was one of the early adopters of flutter and is still on the flutter showcase today in addition if they wanted to use web Technologies to build mobile apps why not just use something like react native ionic or native script instead of Reinventing the wheel well the unspoken reason is that creating new Frameworks gives us developers job security but the official reason in their blog post is mostly about performance performance throughout history many people have criticized react native for not feeling truly native and that's because it relies on a single-threaded JavaScript bridge that allows JavaScript code to communicate with native code like Swift on iOS or cotlin on Android but that single-threaded bridge is a big bottleneck that can create performance issues are you saying there's something wrong with my gear is that what you're saying to me the react native team has addressed this by building a custom engine called Hermes and released the fabric renderer a few years ago which some have called the new and improved Bridge or a bridgeless architecture but B dances has taken a different approach with links using a dual threaded architecture where user code and framework code are split into two distinct runtimes the main thread is powered by Prim JS which itself is built on quickjs which is a tiny 210 kilobyte JavaScript engine its job is to handle synchronous UI tasks like event handling while user code runs on a separate thread which means the crappy inefficient code you write won't block the main thread and degrade performance and the end result is instant first frame rendering for the end user or in other words no blank screens that's pretty cool but what's even more awesome is that this engine is framework agnostic you don't have to use react and could build your app and spelt view or whatever framework you want in addition it supports actual native CSS features for styling like transition animations variables gradients and so on and that's a lot more intuitive for web developers the major problem though is that there's virtually no ecosystem around this framework there's no Expo tooling to solve all your problems and there's no massive widget Library like you have in flutter that being said let's go ahead and try it out to find out if it has any any potential when you generate a project the first thing you'll notice is that it uses RS pack which is a rust based module bundler that's supposedly even faster than V that'll generate a starter template in typescript and if we look at the code it looks like a basic reactjs project where the UI is represented with HTML and CSS but if we take a closer look at the markup you'll notice we're using non-standard elements like view text and image these look like HTML tags but they actually correspond to native elements on different platforms like view is UI View and Os or View group in Android but would translate to a div on the web and what's especially awesome here is that we can use regular CSS or even tail wind to style these elements which is something you can't really do in react native although you could use tools like native wind but now let's go ahead and run it the easiest way to run it on mobile is to use the linkx Explorer app which allows you to live preview it on your phone but when I tried to compile it on Windows I immediately got an error so I tried to switch to the windows subsystem for Linux and while it compiled I could never actually get it to run on the Explorer app is so finally I had to dust off my old MacBook and everything seemed to work a lot smoother on Mac OS and as you can see here when I make changes to my code locally it'll automatically render the demo on my phone impressive very nice I think Lynx has a lot of potential and that's bad news because it means I need to rewrite all my code with this shiny new object at least I can review all that code automatically thanks to code rabbit the sponsor of today's video an AI co-pilot for code reviews that gives you instant feedback on every pool request unlike basic linters it understands your entire code base so it can can catch more subtle issues like bad code style or missing test coverage then it will suggest simple oneclick fixes to help you get things cleaned up quickly code rabbit keeps learning from your PRS over time so the more you use it the smarter it gets it's 100% free for open source projects but you can get one month free for your team using the code fireship with the link below this has been the code report thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one