React Native Tooling: The Invisible Infrastructure Behind Your Apps

What the audience will learn: - The developer workflow: How CLIs (RN CLI, Expo, Rock) bootstrap projects and orchestrate the build pipeline - Build pipeline architecture: How bundlers (Metro) call transforms (Babel, Metro preset) to process source code - Current limitations: Missing tree-shaking, why modern bundlers (esbuild, SWC, Oxc) can't parse React Native, Flow type annotations blocking the ecosystem - Testing infrastructure: How Jest mirrors the bundler transform pipeline and faces the same blockers - Path forward: RFC https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/pull/949 (hopefully it will be merged by then) to ship plain JavaScript, opening RN to modern tooling (comparison to web's evolution from Webpack => Vite) - Concrete impact: What changes when modern parsers become available (faster builds, better tree-shaking, modern test runners)