As a freelance developer at the low end of the market (ie. where most apps and developers live), I can assure you that the logic layer is usually so small that the benefits of making only it cross-platform would be minimal. Most of the code in most of my apps is UI code. RN saves me roughly 80% compared to two entirely separate native codebases. A cross-platform business logic core saves me perhaps 20%.
Sure, I agree for a greenfield social/mobile/local mobile app, RN makes a lot of sense.
> both a desktop (Linux/MacOS/Windows) and mobile (tablet and phone, android and IOS) application from same codebase... word-processing oriented in nature with some interactive graphing and drawing, some displaying, creating and drawing on top of PDFs
... definitely doesn't fit that description. At that point, your choices are JS with RN, React and Electron or C++. For custom graphics rendering and editing, JS would be a very odd choice.
C, that is more C++ kind of is my choice (QT namely). I was wondering if there is a faster approach with JS, since I don't care about what I work with in this case, as long as it doesn't take me much time to do it. Xamarin seemed like a good direction, but no linux yet. Electron, while heavy, seemed like almost a perfect choice - but no mobile.
