

Gingerbread NDK Awesomeness - abraham
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-ndk-awesomeness.html

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CitizenKane
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.

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

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tarkin2
"[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?

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jackolas
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).

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aristidb
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.

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

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

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highfreq
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.

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meastham
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>

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

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tomjen3
Ironically that page fucks the margins when I try to zoom in to read it on my
Android.

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kenjackson
Awesomeness is a 1987 event loop?

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pavlov
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.

~~~
kenjackson
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?

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nightski
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.

~~~
kenjackson
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.

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bad_user
It's missing from Windows Mobile 7.

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kenjackson
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_.

