Make the library compatible with react-native-reanimated

[xseignard]

Why

react-native-reanimated is a popular library for react-native to create and drive animations.

See https://docs.swmansion.com/react-native-reanimated/

react-native is running on 2 threads:

• UI thread for native UI updates
• JS thread for the react-native code execution

To be able to run simplex-noise on the UI thread with react-native-reanimated we need to workletize the functions.

You can read more here: https://docs.swmansion.com/react-native-reanimated/docs/fundamentals/glossary#worklet

How

Added "worklet" directive where needed.

Test

Tested on mobile with [email protected] and [email protected]

Impacts

• None for web users
• None for react-native users not relying on react-native-reanimated
• react-native users relying on react-native-reanimated can now use simplex-noise to create fancy animations running at stable 60fps 🥳

Good to know

Will only work with [email protected]+

[jwagner]

Hey @xseignard ,

Thanks a lot for the PR. I don't quite understand why simplex-noise.js would need annotations to be used with react-native-reanimated. It seems quite backward that a framework would require arbitrary non standard annotations in every library it is used with.

Isn't it possible to just call simplex-noise.js from a function which is annotated? The docs seem sparse but

Worklet runtimes come with performance.now and console.* methods installed out-of-the-box. Other APIs are not available and need to be injected into the runtime or captured via worklet closure.
Seems to allude to the fact that dependencies can be captured in a closure. I think that would be a better way to go about this.

I would prefer not to have non-standard annotations in the code that are only relevant for a very small subset of users.

[xseignard]

Thanks for your answer.
I perfectly understand your point of view.

Unfortunately you can only call workletized function within worklets.

I'll try to find another approach to leverage your great lib in react-native projects.

Thanks for your work!

[jwagner]

Hey Xavier,

I'd hate to give up on this just yet. There must be some sensible way to get this to work. It's just a bit hard for me to experiment without a running react native setup.