New arch or old arch for a new prod app?

[Roshan-24]

While react-native-windows has a nice documentation on the recommendation of whether to go with the new/old arch when starting a new app, it is not clear on what the recommended option for macos is.

I notice that currently, the project builds with the old architecture by default (unlike windows which seems to have the new arch as default from its 0.80) unless I explicitly set the flag, so I assume the new arch isn't ready yet?

[Saadnajmi]

We're due to release 0.81 this week (maybe today) which will be the first version with the new arch as the default. This is somewhat forced, 0.82 and onwards remove the ability to use the old arch, so we want to have one release with the new arch so people can use it and catch bugs before they lose a fallback. Consequently, most of the effort (and delay) that went into RNMs 0.81 release was implementing the new arch.

So my recommendation is use the old arch for versions below 0.81, and new arch for versions 0.81 and above.

[Roshan-24]

Thanks! Is 0.81's new arch mostly on feature parity with the old arch? Because in previous versions I have observed features like color themes (atleast out of the box), key/mouse event props, file drag/drop not working in the new arch. Is there some roadmap/list where I can check what features are still missing in the new arch if so?

[Saadnajmi]

I don't have a complete list, but everything you mentioned (minus platform colors, see #2737 ) we did add to Fabric, so it should be good. Switching between old and new arch is also just one method that returns YES or NO in your app delegate, so it should be easy to compare!