Allow Expo/React-Native apps to call NativeScript to handle low level operations that would've required platform level code.

[trajano]

I was playing around with the Vibration feature of React-native to play Shave and a Haircut

        <VibrateButton title="Shave and a Haircut" pattern={[
          0, // no gap
          200, // shave
          400,
          100, // and
          100,
          100, // a
          200,
          400, // hair
          200,
          300, // cut
          1000, // long pause
          400, // two
          200,
          400 // bits
        ]} />

works well on Android, but doesn't work on iOS.

So I did a quick research and there is likely a way of doing it using CHHapticPattern.advancedPlayer.

That got me to thinking is there a way of getting around of switching to the macOS and I recall NativeScript can do native calls. So I was thinking what if Expo just had a bridge to call NativeScript somehow, I presume it would be a config-plugin and likely needs to be "compiled" separately

[shirakaba]

I made a proof of concept of calling NativeScript from an Expo app. Here's an Expo template for it.

Unfortunately, it's limited to Expo SDK 50, React Native v0.72.4 for now (as that's the newest version of React Native that our fork of Hermes Windows works with). I won't be able to update these forks for newer versions of React Native and Expo as it's beyond my expertise. However, I'm hoping in the next year that Node-API support will land in Hermes core and we'll no longer need any of this boilerplate to make this possible.

[NathanWalker]

Using what @shirakaba describes, I was able to use it with Expo as well; worked nicely:
https://x.com/wwwalkerrun/status/1783503392771547474?s=46&t=xO7ZRuPOKvNVkUfT7PjvTQ

Looking forward to the Hermes PR linked above landing to help make it broadly available.