Binding native APIs that are sync, when RN is inherently async

[mattapperson]

As facebook/react-native#332 sync based APIs can and will come up. I plan on knocking out the tableview issue, but that still does not solve the real platform issue... APIs that are designed to be synchronous including those baked into iOS (and soon android) as well as those created by 3rd parties.

I think RN needs to create helper functions, macros... whatever... to make working with APIs such as these easier.

[brentvatne]

Indeed this is a tough problem to deal with. Let's use this issue to gather some examples of synchronous APIs and discuss possible solutions. I know that @vjeux has some interesting ideas for how to handle this by using Animated.Value to make native the owner of values that are shared between Native and JS, and that value is opaque and can only then be accessed asynchronously via the JS side. For example you could have an opaque scroll position value on a ScrollView. See this conversation

[brentvatne]

One suggestion I heard for this was to have some way to describe logic in JS that could be ported to native and run synchronously, like shaders for example.