Gingerbread NDK Awesomeness | Hacker News Reader

Gingerbread NDK Awesomeness

android-developers.blogspot.com

57 pointsabraham19 comments

This is pretty cool. It would be really interesting to see a full port of Qt (http://qt.nokia.com/products/) to Android. Write a single C++ application have it run on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Android, etc.

Haha! If only it were that easy. You'd probably end up rewriting the UI for mobiles anyways.

"[Y]ou can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java." You'll need to use JNI to do more than the NDK provides in regard to Android's API. I wonder if this will lure C/C++ devs to Android, especially those versed in OpenGL?

Does this mean the NDK will get easier to use? Its pretty obtuse, and I've worked with porting software on multiple platforms (not on one to another exactly).

I hope this means non-Java-based languages (Scala and Clojure would count as Java-based) with C FFI will be easier to use, too.

You can already do simple applications on top of Python / Perl. See http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

Does Android NDK Revision 5 work with the 2.2 API or is only compatible with 2.3?

Do they have a clean way to handle handle native code on Atom, and MIPS as well as ARM? I particularly think Atom has potential in the Android tablet market, but too many native ARM only apps would make it less cool.

They have a way to bundle code for multiple architectures into a single .apk. They don't yet have support for x86 but it appears to be forthcoming.

Source: http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/overview.html

Would be nice if you could ship LLVM bitcode and have it compiled down to arm/x86/mips/etc on the device.

Ironically that page fucks the margins when I try to zoom in to read it on my Android.

Awesomeness is a 1987 event loop?

When you need to port a large C/C++ codebase that is already compatible with "1987 event loops", yes, it's pretty awesome to be able to do this natively instead of having to wrap it in Java boilerplate and performing marshalling between the two environments.

Your bar for what is awesome is really low.

This is really convenient. But its convenient in the same way that getting a 3/8 socket is convenient. Needed for some jobs, but I wouldn't call it awesome.

The Motorola Xoom, borderline awesome. Teleportation, awesome. Adding support for a programming construct that has been around for 25 years, at least, hard for me to call it awesome. Would you call it awesome if they added 6502 acceleration? I'm sure that would be convenient for your assembly language Commodore 64 games.

If this is awesome, what isn't?

Shiny & new != better. This is pure awesomeness for people looking to write applications on Android that require very high performance and want to minimize the costs in doing so.

On top of this, providing a more comprehensive native API may allow other languages (Haskell maybe??) to tie into the Android SDK - now that would be very nice!

Don't be so short-sighted.

I didn't say shiny & new == better.

Doing something that has existed on virtually every platform in the world is a "finally" moment, but not "awesome". Was this awesome when it was in Windows Mobile 1.0? Is it awesome that it's in Meego or Bada?

"Check out the new Bada OS. You can use an event loop! AWESOME!"

Just seems like a degree of hyperbole and marketing that goes completely unchecked.

It's missing from Windows Mobile 7.

And if they add, it won't be awesome. It may be convenient or useful, but it won't be awesome. Just like adding support to use the compass won't be awesome. When they added support for VB, that wasn't awesome.

Awesomeness is being able to use C instead of Java if your heart desires it.

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