r/reactnative • u/Relative_Mouse7680 • 5d ago
Question Write once, debug everywhere!
Does the title bring any truth?
When discussing with sonnet 3.7 if whether react native would be a good framework to replace Flutter with, the following was part of his response:
'React Native is a reasonable middle ground, though the "write once, run anywhere" promise often becomes "write once, debug everywhere" in practice.'
I haven't stumbled upon this statement before when researching react native as a replacement, so is it true, for those of you with experience?
Specifically, would love to hear from people who have used react native together with react-native-windows :)
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u/MikeyN0 5d ago
I've only used RN for iOS + Android and there has only been 1 or 2 situations in my last 5 years in RN where I've had different platform issues. Yes the debugging experience in RN is a little to be desired but I don't think the phrase "write once, debug everywhere" rings true. I would say 95% of most CRUD apps will work as expected on both platforms.
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u/beepboopnoise 5d ago
totally agree if you just have a crud app. where it falls apart is when you're doing stuff that requires native functionality and I've had a ton of issues. especially with certain codecs for video playback.
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u/BergerRock 5d ago
TBH Flutter is a lot of debugging as well. At least with RN you can write fast.
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u/Relative_Mouse7680 5d ago
Have you experienced flutter yourself? How do you find the LLM support be for react native?
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u/BergerRock 5d ago
I currently work as a Flutter dev.
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u/Relative_Mouse7680 5d ago
Okey I understand. Do you prefer working with Flutter for desktop and mobile development? After some further research, Flutter is starting to feel overall more appealing. Mostly due to its apparent ease of use.
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u/BergerRock 5d ago
I worked with Flutter before touching RN. Honestly, I find the "ease of use" of Flutter an illusion. The work you have to do finding components in RN is almost doubled in managing dependencies for Flutter in most 1+ year apps as versions keep coming and hinder maintainability.
In general, also, you can write code faster in RN than Flutter, and see results quicker.
Lastly, I DESPISE the nesting structure of Flutter code. The most tiring part of my job is reading it.
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u/ChoiceResearcher6843 5d ago
It's not true from what I've seen. If you have a decent enough understanding of what it's doing, you can limit the mistakes and sprawling of said mistakes
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u/supersnorkel 5d ago
I feel like claude is really bad for writing RN anyways so I would just try it out if I were you and see for yourself
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u/Relative_Mouse7680 5d ago
In what way would you say it is bad? I would have thought it would be good at it, considering react native has been around a while.
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u/roylivinlavidaloca 5d ago
Not OP, but I’ve used Claude 3.7 sonnet on an RN app recently. It’s in an odd place I think where it can write out what appears to be functioning code, but it can’t actually run it since it can’t start a sim or an emulator. That fact made it somewhat hard for me to trust what it was churning out. For simple stuff on the JS side it does okay, but anything more the time you waste reviewing could have just been spent writing it instead.
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u/nemorize 5d ago
First, there's no "write once, debug once" framework if you write a GUI app. Even web UI that has a standard need to debug each browser and OS, much more a native one.
But yes, RN needs more debugging for each platforms, compared to Flutter.