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Callstack Engineers

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The React Native Show Podcast - Episode 5: "React Native 0.64 with Hermes for iOS"

For quite some time, Hermes Engine was available only on Android. Now, with the help of teams at Facebook, Microsoft and Callstack, it's also available on iOS as a part of the React Native 0.64 release!
That's why we decided to dive into the details of this major update.

In this podcast our host, Mike Grabowski and his guests:

The podcast is divided into two parts. In the first part, our experts discuss technical features of Hermes Engine, its biggest selling points and possible future developments.

The first part of the podcast is focused on the following topics:

  • Hermes improvements to React Native apps in terms of three metrics: Time To Interactive (TTI), Application Size (APK), Memory consumption
  • The “magic” behind Hermes - “Bytecode Precompilation” a.k.a. AOT
  • The difference between AOT and JIT
  • JIT JS engine pipeline vs Hermes pipeline
  • The Hermes roadmap and plans for further improvements

Note: If you've never heard of Hermes Engine before, don't worry. They start with the basics, so at the beginning you will find out what Hermes is and what it actually does.

The second part of the talk is mostly focused on bringing Hermes to react Native macOS.

In this part, the experts address the following questions:

  • What was the motivation behind adding support for Hermes on macOS? Any plans for RN Windows?
  • Were there any attempts to bring Chakra to run on macOS, to say, provide more unified experience across desktop platforms?
  • On Apple devices, unlike Android ones, there was always less of performance and memory related issues when it comes to running React Native applications. What would be the selling point of Hermes in such a case?

This and much more you can find in the 5th episode of The React Native Show Podcast. Pick your favorite platform and check it out!

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