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Comment by myko | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately they will not be mirroring the Android SDK in Go, but only the NDK bits. It's noted in the document that it would be too much of a bear to keep up with the official SDK, and an automated tool would generate crappy, non-idiomatic Go.

I think Dart or another JVM language are the only hope for getting away from Java on Android. Dart is maybe a longshot at this point though.

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The problem with Android isn't Java though, it's the Android API being an inconsistent hacked together in a hurry trainwreck. Everything they've added since 3.x has been an enormous improvement, but they never shook off the baggage of the initial push to release.

Fair enough. Even some of the newer APIs feel slopped together to be honest. Android development does feel like a constant battle with framework bugs.

All android APIs tend to have a large number of methods, but there will be absurd omissions. Example, the WebView has no way to return its HTML contents. So it's difficult to implement your own caching mechanism. Or an even more absurd example, the android YouTube player has no .stop() -- it is simply inconceivable that a media player lacks a way to stop a video, but there it is.

Back when I was writing a client for a REST website, the default HTTP library lacked POST. The recommendation was that every app which wanted to POST should bundle the ~2MB apache HTTP library, which seemed a little painful given that other than that, our app was ~50KB :(

> Example, the WebView has no way to return its HTML contents. So it's difficult to implement your own caching mechanism.

That's a feature to me. Respect my Cache-Control headers!

Funny I had the exact opposite impression after using Java years ago. I felt like Android's API redeemed Java in my eyes a bit. I never liked Java much but the emulator, the debugger, a documented API, lots of example, developer blogs all made it very easy to get started and I create a rather complicated app pretty quickly.

Looking back I wouldn't mind developing on Android again but I wouldn't want to necessarily do anything with Java by itself.

Have to agree, I thoroughly despised Java until I started developing for Android, it suited the Application Framework and made the language fun, developing fully functional apps with ease and speed.

Tell me about it. I'm constantly using the autocomplete to look through all options to complete a method when it should be consistent with other similar things. For instance, you set OnClickListeners but you add TextChangeListeners. This is just a simple example, and yeah it's a small thing, but it's the damn mental baggage of not relying on my brain's quick search to find similar things and having to spend the extra time that really wears on you after hours of it.

The level of hackery even drips down to their own documentation and code examples. There is a line in an old example for a TabPager I believe that said "It relies on a trick." How is this acceptable API writing and role-modeling from Google?

Look at it like this: if you need an IDE to get code written, things have gone off the rails. Most Android developers would be absolutely useless without code completion ..

I think it's "riskier" for Google to stick with anything Java related at this point. Even if it takes 5 years to make the switch, I think they should do it. They don't know what Oracle is going to do in the future against them. The recent win for Oracle has already showed them that they made a mistake not starting supporting Go 2-3 years ago when Oracle first sued them. This could end up costing them soon, but it could also get a lot worse. I think they can't afford not moving off Java. Plus, look how much excitement Apple caused with Swift for developers. They could do the same with Go for Android.

Dartlang is more appealing for mainstream programmer than GO, already has an IDE with debugging intellisense etc. and already has Android backend (see Dartlang source code)

Golang gets intellisense with with gocode. Go has some debugging with gdb and awesome profiling with pprof. While there isn't an official IDE, there are plugins for eclipse and IntelliJ. Go's approach makes it easier to use your favorite editor to code.

They have already paid Oracle. That case is settled. How could it get worse?

No they haven't; the case is still ongoing, remanded to the district court.

Given Google's relationship with Jetbrains for Android Studio how about Kotlin. Cut out Java entirely: Kotlin -> ART.

Kotlin seems approachable and modern. Also compiles down to JS.

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