Texture VS FlexLayout

Historically, Reddit has used both UIKit and Texture as layout engines to build out the Reddit app. At the time of its adoption, Texture was used as a way to build screens and have the UI update asynchronously, which mitigated frame rate hitches and optimized scroll performance. However, Texture represented a significantly different paradigm for building UI than UIKit, and prior to RPL, we had components built on both layout engines. Reusing components across these frameworks was difficult, and having to juggle two different mental models for these systems made it difficult from a developer’s perspective. As a result, we opted to deprecate and migrate off of Texture.

On iOS it’s written using a fork of Texture, formerly AsyncDisplayKit. In my experience, Texture outperforms UIKit’s auto layout and rich text widgets significantly.

https://github.com/TextureGroup/Texture

In order to make our engineers' lives easier and gain consistency in our user experience, we needed a declarative abstraction on top of UIKit. We chose UIKit because after experimenting with SwiftUI, Texture, ComponentKit, and other alternatives, UIKit offers us the right combination of features, including:

Ok thanks. I've included a link for everyone else. Texture

We still wanted to leverage a layout engine that could be performant and easy-to-use. After doing some performance testing with native UIKit, Autolayout, and a few other third-party options, we ended up bringing FlexLayout into the mix, which is a Swift implementation of Facebook’s Yoga layout engine. All RPL components utilize FlexLayout in order to lay out content fast and efficiently. While we’ve enjoyed using it, we’ve found a few touch points to be mindful of. There are some rough edges we’ve found, such as utilizing stack views with subviews that use FlexLayout, that often come at odds with both UIKit and FlexLayout’s layout engines.