Mission Unistyles: The Hunt for Zero-Cost Runtime Styling

Jacek Pudysz

CTO & Co-Founder at Codemask

I'm a passionate programmer who decided to go beyond JavaScript and dive into React Native internals and native languages. I love coding for everything from mobile to backend, and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with the community. Building multiple things at once? That's me! I'm actively exploring new technologies to master my skills.

Mission Unistyles: The Hunt for Zero-Cost Runtime Styling

Is zero-cost runtime styling in React Native possible? Jacek Pudysz (CTO & Co-Founder at Codemask) takes us deep into the internals of React Native’s styling pipeline and shares the ongoing mission behind Unistyles.

How styles flow from JavaScript down to C++ and platform-specific layers through Fabric and JSI.

▪ Why React Native’s built-in `StyleSheet` can be considered the true baseline of “zero-cost” runtime styling.

▪ How Unistyles pushes beyond developer experience, using a C++ core and Nitro Modules to skip re-renders and recompute styles natively.

▪ Benchmarks showing the performance gap between Unistyles and the native `StyleSheet`, and why the hunt isn’t over.

▪ A look ahead at Uniwind, a new Tailwind-inspired runtime styling library for React Native, designed to deliver advanced features with near-`StyleSheet` performance.

This talk reveals both the engineering challenges and future opportunities of runtime styling in React Native, showing why the quest for zero-cost styling continues.