Our idea for React Native bindings

Hello everyone,

First of all, thanks for kickstarting this and consolidating our efforts so that we all can share our experience, efforts and work on new, exciting ways of running apps cross-platform! I am pretty sure that some of you might be already familiar with our approach as @knowbody talk to few of you at ReasonML Conf (that I couldn't attend, unfortunately). Anyway, reposting here for reference and to kickstart discussion before we accelerate our official efforts.

After writing and publishing our navigation library (`callstack/reroute`) and discovering the benefits of writing dedicated libraries in Reason based on existing Javascript ones rather than writing bindings, we came to the conclusion that doing the same for React Native could carry a lot of benefits.

That said, our initial goal was to create a minimal framework based on React Native that provides a whole new frontend to its existing native code (all Javascript gets reimplemented). I would see that as a minimal and modular alternative that would build on React Native foundations. Created from scratch as a separate product, it wouldn't be backward compatible with React Native.

The first thing that comes to my mind is the opportunity to decouple React Native from Metro and make the infrastructure support any bundler user wants. The other one is to get rid of the `local-cli` (command line tools) that keep growing and provide a minimal, yet a friendly interface for deploying apps. Another one, that I think is as important, is the user experience. For a while, there's been an issue to provide a `native-less` way of writing React Native apps, that is, by using `.native` folder and providing commands to do the work behind the scenes for the user. We've been doing some preliminary work in those areas (with products such as `react-native link`) but never managed to connect them all together.

I am curious to hear what you think and whether there have been any discussions about such approach in the past. I know the plan is ambitious and involves a lot of work, but we at Callstack are dedicated to developing cross-platform products and if there's any way to improve on existing libraries, we are keen to try it out at any cost.