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Rishi Kumar Chawda
Rishi Kumar Chawda

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React Native just got better! The New Javascript Engine is here!

Hermes Engine for React Native is here!

So it started from here :

Facebook officially released React Native v0.60.2 about two hours ago which enables the engine as an opt-in feature. This brings a really big advancement on mobile development with React Native as it will give the Android Applications built with react native a significant boost in performance, smaller build size and less memory usage! πŸ’œβ€οΈ

And the integration is so easy! Just enable it in your build.gradle file and that's it. Done πŸ™†β€β™‚οΈ Literally, JUST ONE LINE OF CODE AND THATS IT! ✨

You can see the difference on app startup here!πŸ‘‡ :

The only thing is that you need to upgrade React Native to version 0.60.2 which has a lot of significant changes (RN v0.60 was released a week ago - see changelog here) but well, the improvement for Android apps with this engine is AWESOME! Definitely trying it over the weekend! πŸ’ͺ

Oh, and don't forget to follow this discussion on Hermes' official twitter account!

Who all are excited for this? I definitely am!

You can also follow me on twitter for my shitposts and retweets! πŸ€“

Top comments (8)

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twigman08 profile image
Chad Smith

React Native changed again?
Why am I not surprised. Everytime I look it up they have changed something from a previous release just weeks before.

Sadly I feel like I am only halfway joking. When I was getting started with it anytime I looked anything up I felt like I always saw "this is deprecated now."

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rishikc profile image
Rishi Kumar Chawda • Edited

RN hasn't changed with addition of Hermes in v0.60.2. But yeah, there were a lot of changes in v0.60 including some breaking changes too but if you go through the changelog you'll see a lot of good things that happened. Separating out some apis, changes for better DX, etc.

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noway profile image
Ilia

Absolutely amazing! Great news to wake up to, haha!

Anyone knows what 0.60.1 release is reserved for? Looks like they skipped a version after 0.60.0 πŸ˜… github.com/facebook/react-native/r...

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rishikc profile image
Rishi Kumar Chawda

Looks like they didn't. github.com/facebook/react-native/r...

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domir profile image
Dominique Rau

Can the bytecode compilation approach used for node as well?

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rishikc profile image
Rishi Kumar Chawda

As far as I know, v8 generates an AST which then is converted to byte code by igniter. But that's how v8 works with the igniter and turbofan. I don't know much ( yet ) about how Hermes works but I'm going to take a look at it in the following weeks!

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akashkava profile image
Akash Kava

It would be great if it can be used without React, we definitely need better JavaScript engine for Android.

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mrcflorian profile image
mrcflorian

How do I enable this?

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