[TBD] Windows platform support to be fixed or not

[brody4hire]

At this point I am not convinced whether or not it is worth fixing the Windows platform support (see known issues listed in #23).

This means that I may consider planning to remove support for Windows at some point in the future. Windows support is currently not stable due to some known issues (see #23), and I would see limited commercial motivation to deal with this platform at this point.

Any comments, suggestions, or other feedback from the user community would be much appreciated.

[brody4hire]

Marked as TBD for now, as I am not yet ready to confirm this as a decision.

Lack of response from the user community on this discussion and on #23 (stable Windows support, with help wanted) makes me even more motivated to drop Windows support.

/cc @dlowder-salesforce

[jonthysell]

I currently have the following two issues on me (CLI support for new Windows native modules):

• Enable the CLI to create a C++/WinRT native module library that consumes Microsoft.ReactNative microsoft/react-native-windows#3203
• Enable the CLI to create a C# native module library that consumes Microsoft.ReactNative microsoft/react-native-windows#3201

I was looking into adding it into our own CLI, when I saw that the official RN docs point to this project as the recommended starting point for new native module projects.

[brody4hire]

Thanks @jonthysell, that would be really nice. I have some more feedback with a couple questions coming next week.

[brody4hire]

I have updated the title & description of this issue to better reflect the discussion here.

As I said in microsoft/react-native-windows#3201 (comment), I find the separate .NET & C++ implementations to be somewhat problematic to support; I wonder if there may be any way to support both .NET & C++ components for a hopefully limited period of time. Any pointers would be highly appreciated.

I would also like to drop RN 0.59 support if possible (see #132).

[stmoy]

React Native for Windows vNext will support both C++ and C# components. The default option for creating a new app or module library should also support both C++ and C#. In terms of defaults, we should err towards the most performant option (C++) while still having an option for C# developers as a flag.

More context on the other thread: microsoft/react-native-windows#3201 (comment)

[brody4hire]

Thanks @stmoy for the response. I just added the help wanted label, in case someone wants to contribute a solution. It would be ideal if a solution could support views and example projects, like this utility does for Android and iOS.

Another idea could be to make or contribute to a template that supports Android, iOS, and Windows out of the box, kinda like https://github.com/demchenkoalex/react-native-module-template that was suggested in #159 (comment).

[brody4hire]

One more thing I discovered is that there seems to be now react-native-tscodegen which seems to generate native module code based on TypeScript schema (see #193). If someone truly comes up with a better native module utility than this one it would be really cool 😎