New Architecture of React Native

Ram says there is no single release date for the new architecture. Facebook was initially aiming for 2020, but COVID affected productivity, and 2021 was only a possibility. Internally, Fabric and TurboModules were being tested, with early rollout underway; stability and avoiding crashes were priorities.

Ram says Fabric and TurboModules are in the open source repository, but the build scripts depend on Facebook’s Buck system. An iOS community contribution had wired the systems into Xcode, while Android still needed Gradle work. Codegen could be tried, but Ram did not recommend it for production because it was not officially supported.

Ram points to React Native’s Discussions and Proposals repository, where people can submit proposals, critique them, and share implementation updates. Monica recommends the React Native and React Native Community repositories, particularly the community releases section, along with changelogs and release notes.

The host favors TurboModules for type safety between native code and JavaScript, lower call overhead, and faster app startup. Ram highlights JSI as the foundation for the architecture and a way to expose native APIs to JavaScript. Other panelists favor Fabric for synchronous UI work, smoother interactions with image-heavy collections, and better support for third-party platforms.