ScuffedAct Native 🤮

It's like React-Native but really, really scuffed!

Why? / Disclaimer

This is a project I threw together to learn more about the internals of React-Native, please don't expect anything remotely polished (hence the name). It's pretty much just a barebones proof-of-concept of how to run React on a native OS.

If you are curious feel free to browse the (cursed) source code. I might write a blog post on it at some point, in which case I'll link that here.

To Do

Flexbox with Yoga
Hot reload with websockets
Android mayyyybeee, but probably not

How it was built

I started with a plain react-native project and then uninstalled the core react-native package and some supporting packages. From there I worked backwards from AppRegistry.registerComponent(), and implemented a system to load the JS bundle from the native app's assets and run it in JavaScript Core. The project also includes some bindings for setting up side effects (like JS timers) which are needed to run React.

To support <Text> components and render content to the screen, I used react-reconciler to write a React Host Config. This implements the essential imperative function calls that React usually makes to react-dom, and instead assigns them to native functions that are bound through the JSCore API.

This means that when a React element with a type of Text comes through, the native function is called and understands that it should draw a native Text UIView to the screen.

Usage

pnpm install

pnpm run start

This will start the ~~esbuild~~ ScuffedMetro™ dev server.

The JavaScript bundle is served to localhost:8000/index.bundle and made available inside of dist/. When you build and run the Xcode ios project, it should read the bundle from here.

If it can't, uhh it will probably crash? idk tbh

Features

Runs on (only) ios!
Lukewarm-reloading! (The JS will build on changes, but you gotta rebuild the native app)
Supports <Text />!

Running Tests

To run tests, run the following command

pnpm run test