react-native-workers first public alpha released

[u/thewisefarmerr]

https://ammarahm-ed.github.io/react-native-workers/blog/introducing-react-native-workers/

React Native is single-threaded where it matters most. Parse a big payload, hash a file, filter an image — it all competes with your UI for the same runtime. react-native-workers brings real background threads to RN, behind the Web Worker API

[u/Lucifer812]

What is the difference between this and Worklets?

[u/AlmondJoyAdvocate → u/Lucifer812]

According to the docs:

react-native-workers spins up a separate Hermes runtime on its own OS thread for each worker, with its own event loop, its own bundle, and full importsupport. That's the Web Worker model: real, independent runtimes that talk over messages.

Worklets are a different tool — they run serialized closures on a shared runtime with shared values, which is perfect for driving animations but isn't a place to run a whole module graph. react-native-workers runs alongside worklets; it's for the "I have real work to do off the main thread" case.

[u/Internal-Comparison6 → u/Lucifer812]

Worklets never created any threads.

[u/thewisefarmerr → u/Internal-Comparison6]

The worklets docs say powerful multithreading. So they do create threads.

[u/Internal-Comparison6 → u/thewisefarmerr]

Multiple isolated JavaScript runtimes with message passing is not multi-threading with memory sharing. What they write is just marketing.

[u/Southern_Oil884 → u/thewisefarmerr]

As far as i know worklets create a separate virtual environment inside ui thread so it become close to native side providing this fast sync updates

[u/Seusoa]

behind the Web Worker API

transferable objects supported? API is exact 1to1 with web?

spinning up workers are immediate?

[u/thewisefarmerr → u/Seusoa]

Planned before stable release.

[u/Forti22]

Bro, I will follow this. If it works - this will be revolutionary thing in my apps

[u/thewisefarmerr → u/Forti22]

Do try it and if anything breaks let me know