fast-refresh with react-native about helix

[aiba]

Per #29 I got this working with the latest helix code.

I'd suggest putting a note in the documentation that helix works with react-native, and that you need to tell the react-native dev simulator to "Disable Fast Refresh" when you do your own helix fast-refresh hooking.

[lilactown]

I haven’t used React Native since they introduced the Fast Refresh feature. Would you be willing to open a PR with instructions on how to get started with it? I bet others would appreciate it!

[aiba]

Yes, I'd be happy to.

Hooking into react's own fast-refresh feature is a huge selling point for anyone working with react-native. Especially when using navigation libraries like react-navigation, which don't quite work with the other clojurescript ways of doing live code reloading. With helix, however, I have confirmed react-navigation works perfectly.

I will open a PR with instructions and examples, based on what I've learned.

[lilactown]

Great!

Please be aware, there's currently a couple WIP things about the React Refresh integration:

• Custom hooks are not invalidated correctly all the time; there are plans to leverage defhook to provide this functionality
• When testing with web, transitive namespaces do not trigger a refresh. Example:

(ns app.a
  (:require
   [app.b]
   [helix.core :refer [defnc]])

(defnc app
  []
  (app.b/greet "Refresh"))

(ns app.b
  (:require 
   [app.c]))

(defn greet
  [name]
  (str app.c/greeting ", " name "!"))

(ns app.c)

(def greeting "Bonjour")

Editing app.c/greeting to "Hello" will not trigger app.a/app to refresh.

I'm not sure if this behavior is different in React Native; it is dependent on whether app.a gets reloaded when transitive namespaces are edited. shadow-cljs on the web currently only reloads namespaces that directly depend on the edited namespace.

[aiba]

shadow-cljs on the web currently only reloads namespaces that directly depend on the edited namespace.

Funny you should mention this. For this exact scenario, shadow-cljs now has a {:reload-strategy :full} option. See thheller/shadow-cljs#349 (comment)

[lilactown]

Oh! That's actually fantastic; it had been on my mind to try and create PR for shadow for that and haven't had nearly the time to get spun up on it.

Noting that config option in the Fast Refresh docs would also be a good addition.