2016-12-19

Facebook launched 77 new open-source projects in 2016, yielding 60,000 commits and bringing its total to nearly 400 projects and more than 500,000 followers.

Open-source developer advocate Christine Abernathy offered an overview of the social network’s 2016 open-source efforts, as well as the infographic below, in a blog post. Highlights include:

The top new Facebook projects in 2016 show the large appetite for React and React Native in the developer community. Both of these projects are fundamentally changing how engineers build user interfaces.

Three of Facebook’s top five new projects in 2016 involved adoption of React or React Native.

More than 500,000 developers have React Developer Tools downloaded on Chrome.

React and React Native are two of the top projects on GitHub with more than 50,000 and 40,000 stars, respectively.

The React family is expanding: A preview to React VR is launching this week. Underpinned by React Native, React VR is a framework for the creation of virtual reality applications that run in your web browser. It takes advantage of functional, asynchronous, declarative programming models for building VR applications.

Facebook’s 2016 open source projects brought big efficiency wins to various parts of the stack.

Zstandard is an open-source compression algorithm that can compress data three times to five times faster.

ReDex reduces the byte code (size of Android application) by 25 percent and sees up to 30 percent faster start times.

A suite of iOS tools helps automatically find and fix issues to improve on-device memory usage.

Abernathy added that Facebook saw 13,000 pull requests from more than 2,700 external contributors in 2016, up 40 percent from 2015.

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