cubano

I am wrong to wonder why this doesn't run in a browser, or does it?

I was under the impression React uses the browser DOM (or virtual DOM of course) to render its components...wouldn't that mean it can run on the desktop in a browser?

awinograd
This project is using React Native which is slightly different from ReactDOM (commonly referred to as just React/ReactJS).

In the past, ReactJS and ReactDOM were completely interchangeable. However, some time ago now React split the DOM specific parts of the library into ReactDOM which allowed the non-DOM specific parts of the library to be shared more easily across different rendering targets. Some examples:

  * android (via react-native)
  * ios (via react-native)
  * canvas https://github.com/Flipboard/react-canvas
Since the release of React Native there have been a couple of interesting projects that allow developers to use the same APIs as React Native, but rendering to the DOM instead of android/ios native views.

https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web is a great production ready lib but requires a bit of setup to get it working with a react-native project.

https://github.com/vincentriemer/react-native-dom is an extremely cool experimental idea to bring react native projects more seamlessly onto the web. It's still in early stages and has some significant tradeoffs compared to react-native-web. For one, it includes a webassembly implementation of Yoga (https://yogalayout.com/) which makes layout much more consistent among ios/android/web but at the cost of delivering more JS upfront to the browser.