The React Native team shares their open source roadmap, React Suite hits 3.4.0

Yesterday, the React Native team shared further plans for React Native to provide a better support to its users and collaborators outside of Facebook. The team is planning to open source some of the internal tools and improve the widely used tools in the open source community. In order to ensure no breaking code is open sourced, they are also improving their testing infrastructure.

The following are some of the focus areas the developers will be working on:

Cleaning up for leaner core

The developers are planning on reducing the surface area of React Native by removing non-core and unused components. Currently, React Native is a huge repo, so it makes sense to break it into smaller ones. This will come with many advantages, some of which are:

Managing the contributions to React Native will become easier

Chance to deprecate older modules

Bundle size for projects that don’t use the extractable components will be reduced. This will lead to faster startup times for the apps.

Enable faster reviewing of pull requests and merging.

Open sourcing internals and improving popular tools

They will be open-sourcing some of the tools that Facebook uses internally and provide improved support for tools that are widely used by the open source community.

Some of the projects they will be working on are:

Open sourcing of JavaScript Interface (JSI), an interface that facilitates the communication between JavaScript and the native language.

Support for 64-bit libraries on Android.

The new architecture will come with debugging enabled.

Support for CocoaPods, Gradle, Maven, and new Xcode build system will be improved.

Improved testing infrastructure

Before publishing a code, it goes through several tests internally by the React Native engineers. But, since there are a few differences in how React Native is being used at Facebook and by the open-source community, these updates sometimes result in introducing some breaking changes to the React Native surface. To avoid such situations they will be improving internal tests and ensure that new features are tested in an environment as similar to open source as possible.

Along with these infrastructure improvements, Facebook will start using React Native via the public API, as the open source community does. This will reduce the unintentional breaking changes.

All these changes, along with some more, will be achieved throughout the next year as per the official announcement. They have completed some of the goals at the moment such as JSI, which has already landed in open source.

Releasing React Suite 3.4.0

Meanwhile, the React developers announced the release of React Suite 3.4.0. React Suite or RSUITE consists of React component libraries for enterprise system products. This release comes with TypeScript support and few minor bug fixes.

The following are some of the updates that are introduced in React Suite 3.4.0: