[Discussion] Migrate to Nitro?

[mrousavy]

Description

Hey William (and other maintainers)!

After years of developing C++/JSI libraries, I built a module system with all the lessons I learned and all the requirements we had to build powerful native libraries while still being fast af - I recently open-sourced this - it's called Nitro.

Nitro solves;

• Threading issues with JSI (we just had a hard-crash in RN Skia with RuntimeAwareCache.cpp today)
• Flexibility issues (HybridObjects are basically limitless in features because you can expose everything to JS)
• Performance issues (Nitro uses NativeState, clever caching, and has a highly optimized C++ codebase)

We're migrating more and more libraries over to Nitro, starting with react-native-unistyles, to react-native-video, even react-native-webgpu and react-native-filament. I am also migrating react-native-vision-camera and react-native-mmkv over to Nitro.

I'd love to discuss a potential migration to Nitro for RN Skia as well - I think it could yield great stability improvements (no more threading crashes), as well as a much simpler codebase (way less code, especially for any C++ -> Java or C++ -> Swift/ObjC bindings we had to write ourselves - Nitro does all that). On top of that, we might even see some great performance improvements, but hard to estimate beforehand.

I realize that the RN Skia codebase is huge and a migration to Nitro cannot happen overnight - so I'm just creating this issue to discuss it.

Thoughts? 😄

[wcandillon]

This is definitely of high interest and we have items on the table that will lead us to take a deeper look at nitro.

You mentioned a crash with RuntimeAwareCache, can you provide more context on this? I would like to fix this issue independently asap.