Mobile APP Development with React Native

This month, Bob continues his series on mobile app development from an embedded designer's perspective. He programs a React Native app and he offers guidelines for picking a tutorial for React Native. He further explores how it handles concurrency and asynchronous programming. Bob expected a few nuances during the process but to say there were more than a few would be an understatement.

- Bob Japenga

Learning C and the C stdlib library was something I did on my own. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's The C Programming Language was something I read while in France on a project in 1981. It was simple, concise and easily digested. Plus, it kept my mind off French baguettes. Reading it did not turn me into a good C programmer, but it laid the foundation. Oh, did I just say that I was a good C programmer. My bad! To show my hubris and shallowness, a short while later a friend asked me to help him debug a C program he had written for the PC. He was brand new to C and I was just "new without the brand" to the language. I confidently told him that, with the debugger, we would find the problem in less than a half hour. Four hours later, I was stumped. The problem was that he allocated very large variables on the stack and blew his default stack away every time he used these variables. But like all stack problems, it was very non-deterministic. The debugger was worthless in debugging that. I had not quite mastered memory allocation.

Now, 45 years later, learning React Native is not done by reading one book. The number of components and the intricacies of JavaScript are significantly more complex than C and its standard library. Add to that the React Native components and I found that I needed a serious course. For example, there are less than 50 functions in most stdlib C libraries. Although there are only 24 core components for React Native, each one is probably 10-20 times more complex than each C library function. Add to that the thousands of community supported components and you will understand the complexity.

TUTORIALS ABOUND