react-native-workers 1.0.0-alpha: real multithreading for React Native
React Native has always been single-threaded where it matters most. Your JavaScript runs on one thread, and anything heavy you do there — parsing a big payload, hashing, compression, image work, a chatty reducer, a busy render — competes with the UI for the same runtime. The usual advice is "move it native," but that means writing a native module for every heavy thing you'd rather just write in JS.
react-native-workers brings the Web's answer to this problem to React Native:
real background threads, each with its own JavaScript runtime, behind the Worker
API you already know from the browser. Today it enters public alpha as
1.0.0-alpha.
This post is the full tour — what it is, how it's built, everything it can do (including some things a worker library usually can't), how hard it's been tested, what's still rough, and where it's going.
SharedBuffer. Each run reports the worst UI frame gap it caused — one frame, while a 250 ms blur runs.
