> No updates but if you'd like to help financially sponsor the work to get this done...
For a project coming from Facebook, this is a bit rich. It's basically saying "you can pay us to build it for you," which isn't wrong, but it's not what you expect from filing an issue on an open source project.
What is very well known and understood with React Native is that Facebook has surprisingly limited resources to work on it, so Facebook developers mainly work on parts of React Native that Facebook uses. It's understood that if you have a feature or use case that Facebook also doesn't have, you should be prepared to contribute that yourself.
It's not a case of limited resources. There's twice more people on React Native team than people working on React itself, and that doesn't count all the neighbor projects that RN relies on (Metro, Yoga). And still this isn't enough.
At some point you can't "throw more people" onto the problem. Facebook can't just add a few hundred developers to the RN team and expect them to collaborate well. But that's more or less what you're asking about.
Realistically, several companies "scratching their own itches" as referred to in a sibling comment reply tends to work better because it creates focus and areas of responsibilities around real use cases.
RN isn't maintained by Facebook alone. The surface area is vast, and there are many folks externally who help with different pieces that they depend on or care about. There's a few consulting companies that help maintain RN, and they need to earn money in order to be able to contribute to open source instead of working on their client's projects.
I think this very problem is what makes a lot of people cynical about open source software. HN sees frequent "If you want to see development on [open source project X] continue, money puts fingers to keys" cries for help—from the FSF to Mozilla to Apache. And yet, when one of the most valuable companies in the world writes a blog post about their open source software, leading with:
> At Facebook, we're using React Native more than ever and for many important projects. One of our most popular products is Marketplace, one of the top-level tabs in our app which is used by 800 million people each month.
has a project that's short on cash, how much money does it really take to make this stuff happen? When a company with tens of thousands of employees and billions in revenue and a billion users can't manage to address the very real and critical problems that their insanely popular framework has, what is a tiny project like PyPy supposed to do? What are the folks that make react-router supposed to do? What about the people that contribute to vim/iTerm2/VLC?
Certainly, the world keeps turning and open software keeps getting written and improving. But if you're embedded in open source and you see this kind of nonsense, it's hard not to feel a twinge of cynicism that even a deep-pocketed sponsor can't manage to help a project be exceptional.
Facebook invest in the part of ReactNative that they care. Other companies can invest in the other parts that they care.
Isn't that the point of Open source? Project gets better by everyone scratching their own itches, which collectively means everywhere got scratched.
How would RN being closed-sourced better in this case? Facebook will still fix RN in the part that they care, the different is you don't even get to use that.
It's not unheard of to have "sponsored" issues. In this case though, none of the commenters on that thread work at Facebook. It doesn't mean the issue won't be fixed if no one sponsors it but if you care about it getting fixed sooner, you can send in a fix yourself or sponsor someone else to do that work.
The downside with those is that the build of JavaScriptCore is significantly bigger than the one React Native currently ships with. It's quite a big dependency to have in an app, and a shame Google doesn't expose the system V8 runtime on Android in the same way Apple does with JavaScriptCore on iOS.
Android stopped having a system V8 runtime several years ago. Ever since all webviews you use are just frames to a normal app that's updated over the normal app stores.
