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by pjmlp 3796 days ago
From their Google IO presentations and their atitude towards NDK users vs how other mobile tems deal with their devs, I would say Java runs strong within who calls the shots at the Android's team.

Even if some of the code looks like written by devs recovering from years of exposition to hungarian notation.
1 comments
on_and_off 3796 days ago
The NDK is not part of their priorities indeed (although to be fair it seems that things are slowly getting better with a team dedicated to integrating Clion).

They are smart engineers though and I have no doubt that if C++ had been the best choice for the platform, we would not be writing apps in java ...

tbh, I am really tired of the simplistic 'because java' argument with nothing to back it up ...

I have no love for the language (although I think it gets more flak than it deserves) but I have spent a lot of time working on the performances of Android apps and none of the issues I have fixed would have been any different in another language.

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pjmlp 3796 days ago
I would also used Java if Oracle hadn't dropped the ball in mobile support, as if they couldn't provide JIT and AOT compilers.

So given that I enjoy C++, when conding on my own, that is what I end up using for hobby coding between mobile platforms. But the NDK and JNI wrapping take the fun out of it.

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on_and_off 3795 days ago
I am curious : on what kind of mobile apps are you working on your free time ?

By design, the NDK can only access a very small part of the platform APIs.

It is not an issue if you are making something where you are supposed to use the NDK (like a drawing app or a game), but for a 'traditional' app, that's another matter.

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pjmlp 3795 days ago
Very basic games or for the business logic with the UI done in Java and XAML - C++/CX.

But if Clojure did support properly Android and CoreCLR, I would probably use it instead.

As things are, I might go Xamarin in the future.

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on_and_off 3794 days ago
if you want multiplatform support (or just really like c#/VS), xamarin can be a good choice for an hobby app.

Otherwise, Kotlin borrows many niceties with c# and allows you to directly use the platform APIs.

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