React Native Windows is incredibly slow to compile on a VM

[shirakaba]

It takes me about 30 minutes to compile any React Native Windows app at all (e.g. RNTA) on an Apple M3 Max when running through an ARM Windows VM on Parallels. It's making it incredibly hard to make any progress on anything. By comparison, I recall I was able to build an Electron app in a few minutes.

Is there some sort of trick to developing for Windows on a Mac efficiently? Is Parallels as good an option as any? Are there prebuilds available for RNW? What approach is used at Microsoft?

[tido64]

Did you try using the prebuilt binaries? For RNTA, when generating the VS solution, add --use-nuget:

yarn install-windows-test-app --use-nuget

If you already have an ExperimentalFeatures.props, try adding <UseExperimentalNuget>true</UseExperimentalNuget>: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-test-app/blob/e8edaaa2217aa1191b8a17e35ac1f5065fe98568/windows/ExperimentalFeatures.props#L33

[shirakaba]

Thanks, I've tried now – unfortunately, results are inconclusive as I hit this issue #13559. The build also sadly seemed to take a very long time even with the prebuilt binaries.