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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

There isn't a single topic about Android where you wouldn't whine about this. I've been seeing you for years and you still refuse to understand that C++ is not and probably never will be a first-party language for OS APIs.

It's like whining that you cannot talk to macOS and iOS through C++ without using ObjC APIs or not talk to the browser from WASM without using JavaScript. At this point you really should get over it and either move to another platform or get used to the fact that you talk to Android via Java APIs.

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Then you should improve your reading skills.

The point is not having to deal with Java, one my favourite languages.

The point is the whole experience of how the NDK lacks debugging features, how after 10 years one still has to manually write JNI boilerplate by hand without any kind of binding generator integrated in Android Studio or better given Dalvik/ART why not something like gcj's CNI, how Gradle still isn't able to properly handle NDK dependencies in AAR files, how the ISO C/C++ libs still aren't fully ISO compliant.

And lets not forget some Android APIs, like Vulkan, real time audio and ML are NDK only, so eventually one needs to deal with these issues anyway.

It is also not possible to use C++ to fully write iOS or UWP applications, yet there is a much more productive and developer friendly integration between the managed layer and the bottom parts.

> It is also not possible to use C++ to fully write iOS or UWP applications...

UWP has native C++ APIs. So does Win32, right?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/universal-windo...

Kind of, XAML Controls aren't the best experience from C++/CX point of view vs C#/VB.NET/JS and C++/WinRT still is catching with what C++/CX offers.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-sta...

On the other hand, you do require C++ for DirectX.

And after all those years, you should kinda understand that this is not going to change. JNI is how Java communicates with native code and neither Oracle or Google are going to change that. What's the point of complaining for YEARS about this? Why are you losing energy over that, it makes no sense?

Again, improve your reading skills.

Android J++ as Java fork could pretty much use something else other than JNI, after all they are using another VM to start with.

Second, even with JNI, there is a big difference between forcing millions of developers to write boilerplate by hand, and offering an Android Studio based tool that would automate the grunt part of the work.

Finally, update yourself with the Java world, Oracle is indeed bringing forward a JNI replacement.

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/panama/

Which, naturally will never arrive to Android J++, but that is a discussion for another day.

Complaining is a good way to get companies to improve things. You may think that it's a lost cause, but others have the freedom to think otherwise.

nice example of an ad hominem

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