It's because of articles like this that I can't understand those who say 'Just switch to Expo' when talking about React Native. The frontend should be a puzzle of solutions, not a monolith where a few companies sell the 'magic word' to get out of a problem.
Construct is awesome! Much of the app logic can be done simply by dragging and dropping, you can add javascript if you need advanced functionality, the editor is fast and provides that instant gratification so useful in the early stages of learning.
This is the direction React Native is heading, with Fabric Native Components[1] and Turbo Native Modules[2]. On the development side, you have JavaScript, the language we all love to hate and hate to love, with its vast ecosystem of readily available libraries that are well-documented and used daily by billions of people. On the functionality side, you have access to native code, which speeds up and lightens the workload, making the app performant.
Indeed back in the dotcom wave, the startup I joined was making our own flavour of AOLServer.
Now in some projects, I am basically doing the same, with the difference that now I am using JavaScript instead of Tcl, and C++ instead of C for the native side.
Disclaimer: I daily utilize a cheap Chromebook as a lightweight typewriter, and I love it.
However, it's important to note that Linux on this device is subject to certain restrictions:
It operates within a containerized environment, which limits both disk space allocation and system-wide access. Accessing the terminal requires navigating through a "virtual machine", and files are shared within the /mnt/chromeos directory. Additionally, the utilization of USB devices is layered behind the primary operating system support and Linux backups are separate from the overall operating system backups.
Something interesting about Crostini is that it uses 9p to bridge filesystems, just like WSL2. It seems that 9p has "cracked the code" on bridging filesystems over virtual machines and differing operating systems in a way that other options never seemed to do quite as seamlessly, which I find rather interesting. Maybe it's because it comes with less baggage than CIFS? Easier to extend? Less complex than NFSv4? I'd love some commentary on this.
The filesystem bridging between Crostini, the rest of ChromeOS, and Google Drive is brilliant. It also transparently integrates SSHFS into the filesystem and the file browser.
