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Comment by gw | Hacker News Reader

You already can use official Android APIs with alternative languages as long as they are JVM-hosted, such as Clojure or Scala. Asking for API support from external runtimes would be a tall order and a major undertaking, with probably little benefit. I fail to see what the "charade" is.

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Actually Clojure and some other JVM hosted languages don't work on android as is because they rely on JVM while android uses bytecode converted from jvm to dalvik.

Edit: clojure works on android now but it needed additional porting efforts

Looks to me like Clojure on Android works just fine.

http://clojure-android.blogspot.com/2013/06/state-of-clojure...

Yeah, they definitely require work but it is possible. I had just gotten my Android+Scala setup completed before IO and am now looking into integrating Gradle+Android+Scala, which is proving more difficult.

Because of those issues, I learned long time ago (in the early 90's) to just use official SDK supported languages.

Too much time is spent on hacking an half working solution and in the end the vendor offers no support if the problem is to be found outside the SDK. Or even if it is in the SDK, non supported languages offer a nice excuse to avoid giving support.

This is complete misinformation. Even Java apps on Android are first compiled to JVM bytecode, and then converted to Dalvik bytecode using the dx tool. Clojure and Scala go through the exact same process that Java does in order to make Android apps.

According to http://stackoverflow.com/a/231284/116546 Dalvik does not allow runtime bytecode generation, which may prevent some languages (Jython in particular) from running on Android without some (presumably heavy) efforts.

Android apps are compiled to Java bytecode and then translated to Dalvik bytecode. Clojure should work. There are toolchain issues like interfacing Clojure and AIDL that I'm not aware of the state of development, but it should be very feasible to make Clojure a first class citizen in the Android software development world.

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