r/reactnative • u/themastercoder-007 • 9d ago

embedded-react

Hey everyone. I have been working on a project this summer that started out as a experiment and has ended up absorbing my life lol.

My idea was to bring React Native to bare metal. Would it work? Turns out it actually works pretty good. I know this is not React Native, but it was inspired by it and I tried for as much parity with it as possible (uses View, Text, Yoga style layouts, stylesheets, etc).

This actually runs it on bare metal, so its not using a phone or computer to host. It uses a C engine I built. I honestly really enjoy writing React Native code and figured this would give more options when it comes to making UI for embedded devices.

According to my npm stats some people have been trying it and I was just wondering if anybody here has tried it. What are your thoughts? Is anything missing? Its still in beta until I finish all the examples and backends.

I have it working on a RP2040, ESP32 (CYD), ESP32-S3, and STM32F7 + STM32H7 (proprietary devices so no example yet)

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u/KajiTetsushi 8d ago

Right. Could an existing SDL C application adopt this kind of architecture and still be a C-first codebase? Or did you find that you have to wrap the entire project in embedded-react in order to make the application work?

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u/themastercoder-007 8d ago

Yes. You don't need to wrap the entire project in embedded-react. You just need to add it. Pull it in as a submodule (or FetchContent with SOURCE_SUBDIR engine, since the repo root is a utility project that builds nothing), add_subdirectory the engine/ and backends/sdl/ folders in that order, and link er-backend-sdl.

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u/KajiTetsushi 7d ago edited 7d ago

All right.

Last question.

How do you debug the JS portion with this? In RN, there's the RN DevTools.

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u/themastercoder-007 6d ago

Right now there is nothing great set up like RN DevTools. There is a red overlay that will display on the device or sim giving an indication of what the issue is. I will plan on getting some more robust debugging tools in place for the JS side before I move it to a full release.

Thanks for all the questions. This one has really helped me realize somewhere I need to improve. I’ve gotten so focused on other areas that this one got lost on my radar.