Breaking changes in 0.1.230 beta

[laurens-lamberts]

Hi!

We just tried updating to the new 0.1.230 beta version, but found that many Skia value-related APIs are deprecated.
If I understand correctly, these have to be replaced by Reanimated APIs. Sounds logical to me, as it is sometimes confusing which API is exposed by Reanimated, and which by Skia. Mixing these did not give us the best experiences up to now.

If there is any other reasoning behind this change, could you please share this?
Also it would be great if you could let us know if rn-skia is fully compatible with reanimated substitutes, and if any significant changes at this aspect are expected in the near future. We are currently doubting whether or not to perform migration, which can be quite some work given the extensive use of Skia in our project.

Last but not least, could you maybe include the breaking changes in the release notes so that users are aware of the impact of this update? A brief migration guide to using 0.1.230 would also be great.

Please let us know if we can be of any support on this, and thanks for all the great improvements.

[wcandillon]

@laurens-lamberts, my apologies if the deprecation warnings were only available for a short time (approximately one week). Skia values have been undocumented and unsupported for a few months now. For more information, you can refer to this documentation.

I believe the migration path shouldn't be painful. You can look at this diff on GitHub to get a sense of the changes (specifically in the Example folder). Please feel free to contact me privately if you need help with the migration.

On the technical side, this deprecation brings several benefits:

• UI thread animation.
• Advanced gesture handling capabilities, such as pinching and concurrent gestures (as featured in these tutorials: Tutorial 1, Tutorial 2). These use-cases were not even close to be supported with Skia values.
• Synchronous animation of both RN Views and Skia canvases.
• Reanimated allows us to implement performance patterns related to animations involving JSI objects more easily. For more details, see documentation on animation hooks.
• Easy construction of textures with Reanimated. More information can be found here.
• Reanimated offers a larger and more field-tested feature set than Skia.

Behind the scenes, Skia values were tightly coupled with some of our internals, which would have hindered some of the improvements we plan for 2024.

This decision is also architectural in nature. Skia values have been a topic of much debate, and we now believe their implementation was a blunder. We apologize for any inconvenience this deprecation may cause.

In re-evaluating our approach, we asked ourselves several questions:

• Why should animations be coupled with the React Native Skia internals? Is there a specific need within React Native Skia that requires a unique animation engine?
• If we need a custom animation engine, do we have the resources to build and maintain it? What are the time and resource requirements to match the maturity and feature set of Reanimated?
• Would a custom animation engine be useful for other RN modules than Skia?
• Could any developments be contributed to the Reanimated project directly?

The more we pondered these questions, the clearer it became that deprecating Skia values was necessary.

I hope this explanation helps and makes sense. If not, please let me know, and feel free to contact me privately for further clarification.

[laurens-lamberts]

Thanks for the extensive explanation @wcandillon! All sounds completely reasonable.
I'm sure all things 'Skia values' can be modified in our project to work with Reanimated values without much trouble.
We will use your examples as guidance on that.